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Evolution of Intelligence More Complex Than Once Thought
palegray.net writes "According to a new article published in Scientific American, the nature of and evolutionary development of animal intelligence is significantly more complicated than many have assumed. In opposition to the widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature, in many cases intelligent traits have developed along independent paths. From the article: 'Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains — and sophisticated cognition — have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages ...'"
If anyone assumes linearity in complex systems, it only shows they have no clue. In complex systems, linearity is the exception, not the rule.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
This proves that the Intelligent Designer:
- has never been taught of proper design practice and re-use of previous work
- has been sued by the other intelligent designer who built the previous brain for patent infringement and thus couldn't use the same brain but had to built a new one
- is so messy that instead of trying to dig again her/his/its plans of the previous (intelligent) design for brains somewhere under a mountain of junk, restarting everything from scratch is a better alternative
- isn't meticulous and precise enough be succeed making the same brain twice in a row
- is so bored the she/he/it needs to reinvent the wheel every week or so
- has Alzheimer's disease
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm curious, assuming you really don't "believe in evolution," what do you believe stops it? Leptons and quarks organize themselves into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into amino acids and peptide chains. All of this has been observed in nature or laboratory facsimiles thereof. So what magical force prevents organization from continuing to higher and higher levels, especially once rudimentary feedback loops form?
I've seriously never understood the classical religious position on this stuff. I don't believe it would take a God to steer evolution; based on all available evidence, it would take a God to stop it.
As people who work with computers, we already know that the hard work is never done. What we often forget is that new, exciting changes in our field, whilst just stepping stones, are progress nonetheless.
I wouldn't make any big predictions for the future of our understanding, I think it's many years further off than we all hope. But I am always heartened to hear of progress, and optimism, in the field of scientific advancement.
I am feeling particularly uncynical today. Let's enjoy each new step.
... the same aspects of intelligence can arise independently in different species. I don't know if the article mentioned this (because its very long and I only had time to skim it) but this means the nascent potential evolutionary building blocks for intelligence are widely distributed in species in nature and given a chance will give riser to a smarter brain. Surely a more complex path to intelligence would be one that required specific stepping stones that only ever appeared in a small number of species and all had to occur in sequence?
What I don't believe is the "many have assumed" bit.
Parallel evolution is evident in all kinds of animal and plant features. I can't imagine why intelligence would be any different.
I strongly suspect that most evolutionary scientists don't consider these findings to be surprising. Still, it makes a better headline if you pretend it's a shock discovery.
I don't believe it would take a God to steer evolution; based on all available evidence, it would take a God to stop it.
Hence, the bible belt.
Who's this "noone" you speak so highly off ?
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
. as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Or, as if there are a limited number of adequate solutions to the problem 'control a bunch of muscles in order to survive in a three dimensional environment in which other organisms are trying to do the same thing'.
It seems like what we're seeing is that *if* a species randomly goes down the brain route, it'll either die out, or develop a brain very like other brains. Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
No, it is not. Things of the same type evolving separately, only shows that those traits are successful.
It is also not new. It is pretty obvious that cephalopod and vertebrate brains evolved separately, and that bird and mammal advances over reptiles evolved separately.
Evolutionary Research SlowerThan Once Thought
there
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
So the upshot here is that the intelligence of any given creature is not a function of it's size or age (in evolutionary terms) but is very tightly geared towards the problems it likely faces in it's natural environment.
For example, even a spider can do quite tricky maths in order to work out how to spin a web between arbitrary fixed points, yet is completely flummoxed by even the simplest general knowledge quiz.
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
this means the nascent potential evolutionary building blocks for intelligence are widely distributed in species in nature and given a chance will give riser to a smarter brain.
It takes more than a chance - it takes evolutionary pressure. If something's already perfectly adapted to its environment without a brain, then it's unlikely to evolve one. A brain might even reduce the fitness of an organism (by diverting energy that could be better used for other survival/reproduction mechanisms).
Christians do not deny MICRO-evolution. For example, when two different breeds of dog mate, they form something different.
However, we deny that species evolve into other species. For example, fish do not become horses and cats do not become giraffes.
Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
I have a hard time accepting evolution in general due to the wild leaps it makes. For instance, Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about the origins of life in the universe and the possibility of intelligent design. The best answer that a practiced scientist and atheist can give on the spot is that some higher form of life evolved and then populated the earth with life. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design. He answered NOTHING, but merely moved the issue to another planet. It is circular reasoning. I simply do not understand this die-hard attitude towards something that many reputable scientists have abandoned and continue to abandon to this day.
For reference, the interview with Mr. Dawkins is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc&feature=related
You kid, but this is pretty good support for the intelligent design theory. Here we have multiple organisms evolving human traits independently... as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Wrong, unless that "completed, human state" also looks like a super-intelligent squid capable of toppling the feeble empires of man.
The only reason there isn't a super-intelligent, man-eating squid race is because we beat the squids by a few evolutionary epochs, and their ancestors (who are currently living but less than super-intelligent) will probably go extinct before they have a chance to grow a better brain and develop an oceanic civilization of their own.
But rest assured, I'm sure they would have hypothesized an intelligent designer of their own. Only their intelligent designer would have tentacles on its face, and he would live under aquatic heat vents in heaven while sending the unfaithful to those hellish clouds way above the water.
So they're claiming there's some chance intelligence may eventually evolve in politicians?
I'll believe it when I see some solid evidence.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Maybe a lot of people think that evolution is a kind of convergence to perfectness. Not at all. What evolution is: everyone will survive who is not bad enough to die before making its offspring. So if times come when a good brain eats too much resources and dumb brains are good - just give it a million years and dumbness rules. Then other times come and a good brain has to develop again. No sign of convergence to perfectness.
If you see evolution that way, the article is no surprise.
However, we deny that species evolve into other species. For example, fish do not become horses and cats do not become giraffes.
Do you understand the idea behind "common ancestors?" Nobody has ever claimed that fish become horses and other such absurdities. Burning a straw man without an EPA permit is likely to result in a hefty fine, unless, I guess, if you do it out in the middle of the desert.
You are aware that speciation -- divergence of one species into two incompatible ones -- has been demonstrated, right? What barriers do you propose might exist that prevent one ancestral population from diverging into two arbitrarily-different ones? Be specific.
I'm curious, assuming you really don't "believe in evolution," what do you believe stops it? Leptons and quarks organize themselves into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into amino acids and peptide chains.
I dropped a petitde chain this morning the size of a small baryonic particle. At one point, I wasn't sure if I was taking physics, or if the physics was taking me. And while I'm on that point, what's the deal with studying physics? Shouldn't it be physically studying? I'm certainly not taking anything with me when I'm done.
But back on topic, that dude's argument didn't make any sense, so why did you even respond?
Let's try the alternative:
Comparative neuroanatomy findings indicate that all the various animals have identical brains that evolved identically, and that they all operate on a single function through a single pathway.
I could go on but I'm not going to page through the article to pick at it more, and in so doing satisfy their click-through quota.
I used to really like the old, stodgy, stuffy SciAm. It said what it meant clearly and didn't end up with an oral-pedal inversion by trying to say more than was warranted, or that it felt it had to pump up with hype in the name of market share.
I like the new SciAm too, but I liked it better when it was called OMNI.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
As I've wrote before (f*cking IEEE paywall):
"Convergent evolution is one of the most impressive concepts of Darwinian thought. As stated in the literature, "It is all the more striking a testimony to the power of natural selection that numerous examples can be found in real nature, in which independent lines of evolution appear to have converged, from very different starting points, on what looks very like the same endpoint" [Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker, p. 94]. Eyesight is a good example of a remarkable biological tool that has appeared independently many times. For instance, the octopus' eye has evolved from a line independent of our lineage, and there are records of some 40 such "parallel" lines of evolution leading to the development of eyes [L. F. Land, "Optics and vision in invertebrates," in Handbook of Sensory Physiology, Vol. VII, H. Autrum, Ed. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1980, pp. 471-592]."
Thanks for the translation, I couldn't get past the recursive headline.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
When I said given a chance the evolutionary pressure was a given. You're not going to find an intelligent species arise out of the blue for no reason.
However, we deny that species evolve into other species. For example, fish do not become horses and cats do not become giraffes.
Fish and horses are quite a bit more than a species apart. That doesn't just require speciation (what you Christians call "maroevolution"), but it requires the jumping of genus, family, order, perhaps more depending on your comparison.
There is not one single science paper stating that this happens. Nobody says "Fish become horses". This is a typical creationist (read: Christian) misstatement and misunderstanding. It shows you really don't know what evolution means or says.
Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
That is what is known as speciation. This is when one species becomes two. Again, what you Christians call "macroevolution", or evolution of one species into another. What you have described above is evolution... you have random mutation (your blue fish), natural selection (the green coral environment and the predators within), genetic isolation (a group of these fish move to a different environment), natural selection once again (the blue coral environment and its predators), and this results in speciation (the green and blue are separate and will no longer breed with one another).
One species is now two. Evolution. Now, do this process six-hundred-million times.
I have a hard time accepting evolution in general due to the wild leaps it makes. For instance, Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about the origins of life in the universe and the possibility of intelligent design. The best answer that a practiced scientist and atheist can give on the spot is that some higher form of life evolved and then populated the earth with life. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design. He answered NOTHING, but merely moved the issue to another planet. It is circular reasoning. I simply do not understand this die-hard attitude towards something that many reputable scientists have abandoned and continue to abandon to this day.
Yes, that is Dawkins' answer to Intelligent Design. This is not a reference to anything pertaining to evolution. Stein asked how ID could be applied to science, and the ONLY way is if alien life (intelligent) seeded Earth (design). Why is this the only answer? Because a deity is not science. Your God is not scientifically verifiable. Therefore it (and anything pertaining to it... your Bible, creationism, cdesign proponentists, etc.) cannot be a scientific answer to anything.
And for further reference, Stein was referring to life on Earth, not life in "the universe", something that IDists do not believe in either.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
That's actually true, isn't it? Fish -> amphibians -> reptiles -> mammals.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sure, I could tell *you* knew what you were talking about. But if you're not precise with your words, the ID crowd get funny ideas.
I always figured one day humans would evolve into machines, and machines would continue to evolve.
But Vista changed my opinion about that.
That's actually true, isn't it? Fish -> amphibians -> reptiles -> mammals.
Sure it's true. It's true in the same way that you can go from California to Brazil to the UK to Japan. You're simply leaving out the travel time and stops in between, and quite often that is more important than the destinations.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Go tell that to him, but he won't be happy.
Disclaimer: he doesn't shoot the bearer of bad tidings, but he will eat his soul.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Everything is more complicated than you assumed. Even when you take this into account.
Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all.
Commence republicans/neocons jokes in 3... 2... 1...
- is artistic and enjoys exploring different ways of accomplishing the same thing.
....and realize your description can be as simple as you want to make it or so complicated, like in patent lawyer speak, that even a genius might have trouble following it.
There are different levels of knowledge where the further away you get from core knowledge the more complicated and error prone or distorted knowledge can become.
There is a cycle also to the evolution of knowledge, that it builds up to a point where it breaks down and a re-evaluation is done closer to the core, to again expand out in a modified direction.
The more correct the core knowledge base is the longer the extrapolated knowledge can hold up in its expansion.
Then there is the need to know. Does a bird need to know advanced math or how to fly thousand of miles back to where they were born? Dolphins are consider very intelligent but givemn their physical limitations and environment they live it, there is not much they can do to alter their environment, unlike the physical capabilities of man.
Evolution of the brain is based on the survival instinct that lends to mate selection and in turn genetics. Only abstract man very often disregards physical reality for abstract beliefs and these faulty beliefs often contributes to knowledge distortion not inline with physical reality and survival. So we have the cycle, the ups and downs in society. However, population growth and advancing technology have enables a wider scope of knowledge access and as such .... well knowledge begets knowledge.
What is intelligence, but the trivia of knowledge processing ability and the selection of what to consider as core knowledge.
If creatures have evolved enough intelligence to use tools and anticipate the future, then why aren't all animals intelligent? As some of them have been around for longer than us, why aren't they smarter than us? Some adaptions, such as flight, or vision, or a poisonous bite might seem to have to happen all at once, but intelligence can come by degrees - adding a few more brain cells here and here until you have the right balance, until you reach some natural limit where the head becomes too heavy or uses too much energy.
There has to be a payback for having intelligence. If the animal has something that can grasp objects, then it can use tools and do things that it would not normally be able to do. If you are a shellfish then there is not much you can do with your deep thoughts, so a smarter shellfish is less likely to survive.
This is guesswork, but maybe extra weight in our head makes us clumsier and vulnerable to neck injuries. That, and the energy requirements of the larger brain. But it's not really that much larger, is it? Birds have very compact brains - if this was an issue, then our brains would be smaller too. No - I think there has to be something else, but I can't see what it is.
Any ideas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders note:
# C - Whole chromosome extra, missing, or both - see chromosomal aberrations
# T - Trinucleotide repeat disorders - gene is extended in length
Anyway, I will ask you a simple question if we build a device to directly view the past and you can watch over billions of years as life evolves as scientists thought it did, and see the most interesting thing Jesus did was starting a cult. Would you still believe in God?
What barriers do you propose might exist that prevent one ancestral population from diverging into two arbitrarily-different ones?
If an individual strays too far genetically, God drops a rock on it.
Stein was referring to life on Earth, not life in "the universe", something that IDists do not believe in either.
How so?
I know many Christians who believe in both ID and alien civilizations. While Man was made in his (God) image, many see this as an ideological and not a literal interpretation.
Life is not for the lazy.
Many Bible-believing Christians are evolutionists.
Nobody interprets the Bible entirely literally. So, it is simply a matter (albeit a very important one) of where to plant your feet on the slippery slope of allegory. Did God literally lift up Israel with his strong right arm? I'm sure you'll agree not.
Please read Francis Collins' The Language of God
http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/0743286391
I've seriously never understood the classical religious position on this stuff. I don't believe it would take a God to steer evolution; based on all available evidence, it would take a God to stop it.
Please don't mistake the ramblings of a minority of fundamentalists for the 'classical religious position'. For example, the catholic church officially recognizes the validity of evolution. Most intelligent religious people do as well, and many scientists are religious.
Point being, modern fish resemble the common ancestor of fish and horses about as much as horses do.
"If something's already perfectly adapted to its environment without a brain, then it's unlikely to evolve one." - Hence why society today is no longer even trying. Why struggle to improve when failure is rewarded as much as success?
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
There is not one single science paper stating that this happens. Nobody says "Fish become horses". This is a typical creationist (read: Christian) misstatement and misunderstanding. It shows you really don't know what evolution means or says.
Please don't pidgeonhole all Christians under the Creationist camp. There are many Christians that are not diametrically opposed to evolutionary theory. Rather, we see the creation story in Genesis to be allegorical and poetic, instead of trying to place it under textbook scrutiny.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
.
Hardly, more like
Proto-fish
Intermediate fish . Proto-amphibian
Intermediate fish . Intermediate-amphibian . Proto-Reptile
Intermediate fish . Intermediate-amphibian . Intermediate-Reptile . Proto-Mammal
__ Current Fish _ . __ Current Amphibian _ . __ Current Reptile _ . _ Current Mammal
.
Most modern fish are as far from the common ancestor as modern amphibians, reptiles, and mammals; barring archae that live in relatively unchanging, low mutation ecologies.
Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all.
I'm tired of you people picking on Bush. It's over for crying out loud.
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"? :P
Terence McKenna would hate ya
Quote:
Animal life has been transfused with something either willfully descended into matter or trapped by some cosmic drama. Something in an unseen dimension is acting as an attractor for our forward movement in understanding. [...] It's a point in the future that affects us in the present. For example, if you were to do your Christmas shopping in July, then Christmas is an attractor for your summer shopping habits. Our model that everything is pushed by the past into the future, by the necessity of causality, is wrong. There are actual attractors ahead of us in time -- like the gravitational field of a planet. Once you fall under an attractor's influence, your trajectory is diverted.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
The "classic religious position" probably refers to pre-enlightenment religious doctrine, which is echoed in today's Religious Right. The Catholic acceptance of evolution is largely the result of an especially moderate Pope. By and large the religious elite of today are still hostile to evolution, in spite of the more moderate "flocks" they tend to.
You're correct that many people who identify themselves as religious have a worldview that includes evolution. These people either go to small liberal churches or quickly learn to keep their opinions to themselves.
In short:
"I'm afraid we're going to have to evolve a little further before we can understand how we evolved to this point. Unfortunately, we'll be beyond this point by then and busy lamenting this same fact regarding THAT point."
When speaking broadly, you do some more mainstream of the group a huge disservice. Not that many around here will call you on it.
Saying "Christians do not deny...", you are speaking far too broadly. You should say, "proponents of creationism" or some such. The simple reason being that the Vatican has claimed otherwise. Maybe you'll next claim that Catholics aren't really Christian, but most people, I think, understand them as such.
Personally, I don't find any contradiction from evolution to ID to creation, as I merely see evolution as the how, not the why. And, even then, I see small and large holes in evolution, holes that remain to be answered, not as disproof, similar to how the laws of relativity merely filled holes in Newton's laws rather than disproving them.
As Dawkins himself answers here, the entire question at that point was nonsensical. Stein was asking a man who emphatically believes that Intelligent Design is nonsense to construct a scenario in which Intelligent Design might have happened. And as ID proponents so often point out when asked about the religious implications of their position, "they're not necessarily talking about a deity." Well, what does that leave, apart from aliens? The entire exchange in question is basically a believer getting a scientist to describe Intelligent Design's own belief structure, and then crucifying him because he didn't mention God. It's ID that's nonsensical, Dawkins was merely repeating your own words back to you.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I know many Christians who believe in both ID and alien civilizations. While Man was made in his (God) image, many see this as an ideological and not a literal interpretation.
And I know many Christians that believe in evolution :)
I'm pretty sure this whole thread was started as a troll. It starts with, "We believe"... lol. As if someone can represent the views of "Christians".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How long did astronomers look at the stars before they decided to stand up and say that the Earth was not the center of the Universe?
It seems that it has taken us about 150 years post-Darwin to stand up and say that the human brain is not the center of intelligence on Earth.
Anyone that looks at (fat, wasteful) modern society in proportionate cross-section should see that the vast majority of today's humans are just random actors following mostly reflex / instinct without much cleverness involved. Maybe when life was harder we were more clever because we had to be, but if an alien cognition researcher plucked Joe the Plumber out of middle America and put him to a test of higher cognitive power - I bet he'd come up lacking.
If we don't wipe them out entirely, we may be accelerating the evolution of squid by challenging them. Some challenges (like change in ocean chemistry / temperature) don't have obvious advantages for intelligence, but other challenges like varying their food supply and hunting them should perk up their cognitive gene pool pretty quickly.
Terence McKenna would hate ya :P
I heard he was on drugs! :-O
so I'll ask you a question: Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?
Down Syndrome. Common enough for you? From the link:
"Down syndrome, Down's syndrome, or trisomy 21 is a chromosomal disorder caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome. "
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We're constantly being told that scientists have it all hammered-out; they know all there is to know. About everything.
By whom?
If that's the case why don't all the scientists pack it in and do something else?
Fact is, science distinguishes itself from religion by NOT having it all hammered out. There's always more to find out.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
I don't think that word means what you think it means. (Or rather what the word "races" meant at the time.)
Here is a rebuttal against accusations of Darwin being a racist.
Actually I don't know what he believed about non-white humans, but none of it would make him wrong about evolution.
Yes yes, and Newton was a mystic and an alchemist, but that doesn't mean we should abandon calculus and classical physics. We don't dismiss all of psychology because of the quirks of Freud and Jung.
The map is not the territory. The part is not the whole. Evolution is not "Darwinism", relativity isn't "Einsteinism", and physics isn't "Newtonism". But engaging in an ad-hominem attack on a man centuries dead is sheer "Bozoism".
The parent post didn't say he/she thought the whole Bible was just allegorical or poetic; just the creation story as found in Genesis. There are plenty of us Christians who believe that the creation story told in Genesis is simply a simplistic retelling of what happened. For example, the 6 days (+1 of rest) are not actually 24 hours or 1000 years are anything like that - they simply represent periods of time, which could have been millions or billions of years.
Further, a belief like creatio ex nihilo, for example, is not Biblical. It takes some serious stretching of scripture to argue that point. The clearest reference to it is in 2 Maccabees, which is not generally considered canonical scripture by most Christians.
In any case, you can accept parts of the Bible as allegorical or poetical (although I'd argue that those are very few) without accepting the whole Bible as allegorical or poetic. I do not believe the creation story is simply allegorical or poetic, I just believe that it is not a fully accurate description of what happened (however, it's no more simplistic than most textbook descriptions of evolution - the issue is much more complex than can be described in a few sentences).
Observe: The reason why creationists are creationists is that they are ignorant of Evolution. Education might take care of this. In case this ignorant creationists checks back, here's a hint: This is not how Evolution works. Existing species don't evolve into existing species/predefined species.
No it isn't. This is a straw man, and misrepresents Dawkins' position to a degree that I'm having problems taking you seriously. Do you really beleve your own nonsense? If you do, you are simply stupid. If you don't but post it anyway, you are both evil and stupid.
Clever signature text goes here.
I know that one concept that I had difficulty with was the notion that species is nothing more than a classification system. It took a long time to truly rid myself of the notion that organisms "jumped from one species to another". I still would have difficulty making the "what is a species/where is this invisible line that cannot be crossed" argument without feeling like I'm using double talk.
I'm from the Bible Belt you insensitive clod! Seriously, though it's a great place.
There are too many coincidences to make it seem like this all happened randomly without any sort of intelligence.
I don't doubt that there is no "God" as seen by man. But you are deluded, to be honest, if you believe everything happened randomly without reason.
The further we get in science the closer we get to believing there is certainly some intelligence in the system. It is not very likely some old bearded man threw some objects together to form the universe, but rather that the organisation of everything... that all matter itself... forms a sort of "planetthink", that everything somehow knows how to work together to form things.
If there was no intelligence whatsoever, and note that intelligence is used loosely here, how did we end up here?
Things change, that's true. But to base your arguments on nothing but hatred for people who are not your enemies (radicals might discount evolution, but whales are some evidence to a form of evolution, and what goes on in isolated human communities is also somewhat evolution, just not in the right direction)...
No John, you are the zombies.
So the bible is fact until science disproves some part of it, at which point you can simply decide that that part is just metaphorical and thus is still correct by some interpretation.
Genesis is not a retelling of anything. It is just as truthful as the Australian Aboriginal "Dream Time" and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's story of drunken creation.
1178161 is prime...
Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred.
So, here we have two different varieties of fish that look different, have different genes, and cannot inter-breed. Species is a classification system that is subjective in nature, so there is no truly objective definition of whether they are two different species, but where would you draw the line? What else would need to happen before you could say they were different species?
The hard part is this; When you say I believe in microevolution but not macroevolution, you are really saying "I believe in evolution, but with some exceptions". The broader your definition of species is (I.E. the more differences that are needed to declare something a new species), the fewer exceptions you are allowing. The narrower your definition, the more exceptions you are allowing (and the more credit you are giving to a god), but also the more difficult it is to make a claim that hasn't already been disproved.
I have a hard time accepting evolution in general due to the wild leaps it makes. For instance, Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about the origins of life in the universe and the possibility of intelligent design. The best answer that a practiced scientist and atheist can give on the spot is that some higher form of life evolved and then populated the earth with life. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design.
In this interview, Richard Dawkins was asked for a scenario in which ID would be feasible. He answered "Aliens" because the theory that a god existed seemed unfeasible to him. But of course, if you believe in a god, then he is an alien. Dawkins merely repeated ID's claim and suggested an answer to the question "where did god come from".
If you want to criticize Richard Dawkins for having ridiculous ideas, then please criticize him for the moments in which he describes his own beliefs, not yours.
One species is now two. Evolution.
Just wanted to point out that that happens over thousands to millions of years itself. What is more liekly than one fish having a genetic mutation that makes it blue and breeding this trait into the general population is that the group of fish have genes which would dispose an individual to look more blue. As generations and generations pass, if there is a natural benefit to looking blue, more of the fish who are more blue will survive and over time will become a new species that is always blue.
Is that totally off base? It seems like a lot of ID debates come about because of nuanced misunderstandings of the theory of evolution or the purpose of religion...
wear slip-ons
+1 fashionably cynical
Oh how I wish it were possible to have a discussion of biology on Slashdot without discussing mythology. Having to explain/defend the basic principles of evolution over and over to the the hordes of deliberately miseducated really is a tiring exercise.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My cats are little autistic people. They have just as must right to the benefits of "personhood" as you do. Bigoted people that draw the personhood line right at H. sapiens sicken me. Treating other species as chattel merely because they aren't "made in our image" is incredibly ignorant. Perhaps this article will help to further dissuade people from adopting that perverse attitude in the first place?
Hah, man was made in gods image, aliens weren't! Time for some intergalactic space crusades.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
I enjoyed it up to the point where Abe Lincoln supposedly ran for President in 1858. It was 1860. 1858 was the Senate race against Douglas. I know most of the rest is accurate, but finding a gross inaccuracy like that really destroys the suspense of disbelief required for reading the rest.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Commence democrats/socialists jokes in 3...2...1...
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
evolutionist agenda
Huh? What agenda is that? What really bothers me about religious thought is that they (you?) see everything in terms of agendas. Because religious people have no method for understanding whether something is true or not but only an understanding of competing faiths, they see science as merely a competing faith. Well, it's not. It is a method for refining the understanding of data, improving knowledge, repeatedly analysing and perfecting what we know. There is no agenda. There is only a search for truth.
Of course, that's the ideal. In practice we're all human, filled with petty pride and whatnot, and politics comes up in science too. But no matter what the politics, the fact remains that truth can be tested. Science works.
But compare that with religion. You have a set of "truths"--things that are not subject to investigation. If you don't believe that Jesus or Mohammad or Hermes is the true messenger of God(s), you are cast out from the circle of people who have chosen--CHOSEN--to believe some nonsense. Based not on reason, but on a hunch. In the intellectual world of religions, the best you can ever hope for is to make an argument based on wishful thinking. Science could show you which variety of Christianity or Islam or Zoroastrianism or Hinduism or whatnot is correct, but of course admitting the possibility of finding out that truth is never admitted, for obvious reasons.
There is NO AGENDA. Science seeks truth. Religion simply declares it. If there's an agenda, it is getting all those religious morons to understand the difference between data and wishful thinking.
. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design. He answered NOTHING, but merely moved the issue to another planet. It is circular reasoning.
Huh. That seems odd. You're right--that's circular reasoning, and has no place in science (at least the version you presented; if Dawkins did the same thing you're right to be shocked). But of course, religious people perpetrate a more extreme version of the same thing: remove "aliens" and insert "god". Who created the universe? Who created Man? Which is more likely to have come about naturally and to put an end to this loop of "A created B": a simpler life form that somehow evolved naturally, or a life form at one time capable of breathing universes into existence (but now strangely capable of miracles on the order of drawing a picture of the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich)? Which is a more sensible hypothesis?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Point me to where I (or indeed the post I was replying to) used the word "directly". Aha.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm a baptized, confirmed, signed, sealed, and approved Christian. It's my culture. A lot of it is pure voodoo, but there are some decent messages buried in there. Big man in the sky? Probably not. It looks to me like we're on our own, but I'll still put an angel on my tree, thanks.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with the bible basher on this one. I'm pretty sure if you're to claim you're a Christian, you need to believe at least:
All the other stuff, I think you can be flexible about. But that bullet list - you need that to be Christian. I know it all looks a bit unlikely. That's why it amazes me there's so many of them.
Now, I was brought up in a Welsh Presbyterian tradition (which doesn't the fundamentalist connotations it may have in the US) and like you, despite not believing in the mumbo jumbo aspects, I hold 'Christian values' dear - love thy neighbour, turn the other cheek, all that good stuff. I have a star atop my Christmas tree. But I'm still an atheist.
You, since you don't believe in a "big man in the sky", are either an atheist, an agnostic, or an "it's a bit more complicated than that". If anyone asks again.
What barriers do you propose might exist that prevent one ancestral population from diverging into two arbitrarily-different ones?
If an individual strays too far genetically, God drops a rock on it.
Is that rock so heavy even God can't lift it?
Please don't pidgeonhole all Christians under the Creationist camp. There are many Christians that are not diametrically opposed to evolutionary theory. Rather, we see the creation story in Genesis to be allegorical and poetic, instead of trying to place it under textbook scrutiny.
So you are saying that you accept the scientific conclusion that all life on Earth has a common ancestor that can be traced back some three billion years ago with no deity involved?
So why follow a religion?
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Why don't Republicans believe in Evolution?
Because the first generation in their sample was Abraham Lincoln. The last was George W. Bush.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
I have a hard time accepting evolution in general due to the wild leaps it makes.
But positing the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supernatural being who controls the entire universe isn't a wild leap?
I hate to stop you from bashing someone who sounds like they are just begging for it, but:
I don't believe that nucleonics or chemistry represent Evolution. If you can define a set of multiple generations for quarks, and show how those generations have changed, and perhaps more importantly, have been selected for, I might just change my mind. Show me just one quark that failed a natural selection test, and now lies dead without having given birth to a litter of baby quarks.
What you've done is to redefine 'evolution' to just mean 'change' and then argued in effect that no one in their right mind would disagree with the ancient Greek philosopher who said "Everything is Change". Real Evolution is for things that can know Death.
Now let's look at the amino acid bit. The classical experiment proved it was much easier to get very simple compounds to organize up to the Amino Acid level than was thought. A little electricity, UV light, some Methane and Ammonia, and a very short time was all it took. Scientists confidently predicted that Proteins and DNA were just a few weeks away, then months, then years... maybe if we built a glass sphere the size of the Pacific Ocean, and ran the experiment for a million years... maybe a billion... wait, nature only needed about a quarter of that...
The very same experiment that revealed one step in the synthesis of life was a lot easier than we once thought, ALSO showed that the next step was much, much harder. The whole Folding at Home project is really about producing just some of the data we will need to define the goals of the next experiment, and as you probably know, FaH isn't finished just yet.
Really calculating the total probabilities is hard, and even real, professional scientists disagree over a lot of assumptions that you have to make to determine if this experiment actually proved life is more a normal, near inevitable consequence of an early earth-like world's chemistry, or if it is actually as unlikely as pre-evolutionary thinkers thought it was, or just maybe, even more improbable.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm sorry but you are wrong. There is no legislative body with any true authority that can deem you a real Christian or not, no matter how hard they may try.
I'm pretty sure that by definition, anyone who tries to live by the teachings of Christ is free to call themselves a Christian. This is regardless of whether or not they live by all of them, or live by the rules of the religion his ideology grew out of.
Just splitting hairs. But I think it's important because otherwise you set up a polarizing environment, where you think all Christians actually believe everything you listed.
Some of them just want Christ Consciousness. You know, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek.
Genesis is a creation a story. There are literally, MILLIONS of creation stories in the collective human mythology. All creation stories, born from mythology, by their nature are ALLEGORICAL. To accept mythological texts, as anything but allegorical is quite dangerous.
Christianity = MYTH people.
And that is not in a derogatory sense (anymore then saying that the Hindu creation story is another myth). In other words, it's an attempt to explain that which cannot be explained but why is it necessary for it to be anything more than one attempt at explaining that which is out of scope of our experience.
Amen! Purge the filthy alien scum!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I'm atheistic/apatheistic/agnostic, whatever you want to call it, but I've never understood why anyone would say that proving evolution (via your device to view it in action) would prove god/gods doesn't/don't exist.Likewise, I don't understand people on the flip-side who think that somehow believing in evolution is contrary to believing in god/gods.
The only thing proof of or belief in evolution would indicate is that the literal interpretation of the Bible is false. That's it. Trying to push it and say that evolution disproves god is illogical - it just disproves a particular tale of how a god or gods might have created things. A particular tale, I might add, that only *recently* has been believed by anyone to be anything but a bunch of metaphor and allegory for various events, concepts etc.
The whole "evolution denies god!" or "evolution disproves god!" argument is just flat-out stupid. It's like saying that the existence of apples demonstrates conclusively that super-string theory is false, or that Newton's laws of motion prove conclusively that unicorns don't exist. The two arguments have nothing to do with each other, except that some people use tortured logic to try and connect them in some kind of meaningful way.
By the way - Georges Lemaitre, the father of the big bang theory (though he didn't call it that)? Catholic priest and, one imagines, quite the believer in god in addition to being a half-decent physicist. I guess he didn't get the memo about the bible being literal truth...
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
So you are saying that you accept the scientific conclusion that all life on Earth has a common ancestor that can be traced back some three billion years ago with no deity involved?
So why follow a religion?
Without going into too much detail, since this is getting off-topic, persons of this camp would say something to the tune of: "There is an ultimate creator, but the exact description of the methodology of how it came into place is beyond the scope of the creation story in Genesis." The intention of the creation poem would then be to explain, using literary elements of allegory and metaphor that, for example:
At the same time, by admitting that the creation story is a poem, we would not discredit much of evolutionary theory. Seven days of creation would then not be taken literally, but rather, would be interpreted as 7 being a number that signifies completeness to the poem's audience and a "day" being a span of time that has a start and a finish.
There are too many coincidences to make it seem like this all happened randomly without any sort of intelligence.
Riiiight. Such as?
But you are deluded, to be honest, if you believe everything happened randomly without reason.
Of course it didn't. Evolution doesn't equate to randomness. Where on earth do you get that idea? Evolution is based on just a couple simple principles:
1) Offspring possess random changes.
2) Pressures (environment, social, reproductive, etc) cause some of those changes to increase or decrease an individual's chances of reproduction.
That's it. Those two statements completely describe natural selection as a principle. And evolution is just natural selection in the large. Now, I draw your attention to the second component. *That* is what makes evolution tick, and it's *far* from random.
The further we get in science the closer we get to believing there is certainly some intelligence in the system.
If you believe that, you don't understand the history of science. The exact *opposite* has been happening since the scientific method was established. Every new discovery pushes back the boundaries of what we consider "religion". Remember, before germ theory, there was a time when people thought illnesses were curses sent down by angry gods.
If there was no intelligence whatsoever, and note that intelligence is used loosely here, how did we end up here?
I'm sorry, what's your point? Just because we don't have an explanation, doesn't meant that an invisible Man in the Sky is the answer. In fact, given the history of religion as a theoretical and explanatory framework, I'd argue we should be avoiding these kinds of appeals to the supernatural, as they've invariably turned out to be wrong.
I think I'm right in saying that there actually is a fairly clear-cut way to differentiate one species from an other - the ability to breed and produce viable offspring.
If fish #1 and weird-version of fish #1 can still breed and produce offspring that can themselves breed with other fish #1's then that's just variation within a species and speciation hasn't happened yet (the weird version isn't quite weird enough yet). Otherwise, they're 2 separate species.
The viable offspring bit is important when looking at hybrids - a horse and a donkey can breed to make a mule, but mules are sterile, so horses and donkeys are separate species.
The Council that put together the Bible 200 years or so after Christ's birth, debated hotly which books went into it. The whole Old Testament was included for chiefly two reasons*
1. Some (not nearly all), wanted to include any OT book that seemed to have a prophecy of Jesus's coming, so that Christians could see that He met all the tests.
2. Some wanted all the Jewish laws in every copy of the Bible, so that Christians could see what laws Jesus was talking about when he spoke about living not by the law but by every breath which comes from the Mouth of God, and other such things.
While there were some people who favored a third reason, genuinely believing that God wanted all Christians to keep to all the OT rules, they actually were far, far short of a majority. Paul's writings on circumcision seemed to have already clarified that point to most.
Some of the council didn't want parts or even any of the OT. The resolution to cut it to just the five books of the Torah narrowly failed. Some felt that any Christians who wanted copies of what became the OT for their church should just make those on their own, as they were of the opinion that only churches with a large Jewish convert membership would want to go to the extra expense.
This same process happened with the New Testament. Some Gospels were excluded because they seemed to disagree with others, some were taken as true but left off the list just because they didn't add all that much to the first four. There was a debate about whether four was enough, or too many, and it ended up being settled by an argument that four was the number God must have wanted, since He made so many 4's in nature, such as the four classical Greek elements. (And half a dozen attendees wrote home saying that the argument was silly, but since enough people bought it that the council could move on to the next point, it was probably OK). There were lots of Revelations, and the council picked one that seemed best, but some of the ones they left out were believed to be doctrinally OK, just too long to add to an already huge book that the council was going to urge every church to get a copy of.
I have tried to keep the two commandments as Christ gave them, and I hope that Paul was right when he said 'the greatest of these is charity', for those times that faith and hope have seemed far away. I do not see how it is possible to be a Christian while denying the existence of God, but I have every hope that, if the first AC has tried earnestly to love his neighbor as himself, he just might make it through the needle's eye.
*As various of the members themselves said, in letters back to the churches that had sent them. These are letters of record, both ones found by modern archaeological digs and ones that have been in the Vatican's collections for centuries. Even if the latter may include forgeries and such, the people who have studied these have done real science to weed most of those out. It's extremely unlikely, for example, that anyone planted a forged letter in the Vatican's collection in, say, the 12th century, and then bothered to plant copies with the Ethiopian Coptic Church or the Eastern Orthodox churches too.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm pretty sure that by definition, anyone who tries to live by the teachings of Christ is free to call themselves a Christian. This is regardless of whether or not they live by all of them, or live by the rules of the religion his ideology grew out of.
Well, that's two of you, and I guess there might be plenty more. I'm surprised I must say - in 35 years this is the first time I've been exposed to what seems to a mainstream tendency to describe yourself as 'Christian' despite not believing in, you know, the basic tenets of Christianity. You live and learn.
Just splitting hairs. But I think it's important because otherwise you set up a polarizing environment, where you think all Christians actually believe everything you listed.
It only becomes polarised if you think that all non-Christians don't believe in the good stuff. The being a good person bit.
By reserving the Christian label for people who believe in the Christian faith, you can demonstrate that the rest of us are decent people too. I bet if you tell a real Christian that you're Christian, they're going to assume, as I would, that you believe all the God/Hell/Heaven/Sin stuff.
Some of them just want Christ Consciousness. You know, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek.
There's already a perfectly good phrase to describe that kind of person "decent human beings". You don't need Christ to be a decent human being (though he did create some catchy slogans). Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. all manage to love their neighbours and turn the other cheek.
Evolution theory does not require that a new species be introduced in a single generation. The theory contends that small genetic changes from one generation to the next accumulate over time, eventually giving rise to a new species. At every point, organisms from any given generation could produce fertile progeny with members of several previous and several subsequent generations. But, if genetic lines are allowed to diverge enough, at some point the accumulation of genetic differences would provide infertile offspring or no offspring at all.
If, on the other hand, this creationist argument is correct and evolution theory is flawed, this would suggest that different species should not be able to breed at all. If two separate species since the beginning of time could never produce fertile progeny, it would be very surprising if there were an example of two species that could produce hybrid offspring of any kind regardless of that offspring's ability to reproduce. Unfortunately for the creationist, this argument offers no explanation for the existence of the mule or the many other sterile cross-species hybrids.
Addressing the micro- vs. macro-evolution argument as a whole is easily done. The taxonomic categorization of organisms is a construct defined by people. It is not reasonable to presume without evidence that there exists some cellular mechanism that prevents genetic mutations with regard for human-created taxonomies. Once one admits that evolution occurs within a species, it naturally follows that mutations could conceivably accumulate to any degree without regard for species or any other invented taxonomic boundary.
Conversely, discounting macro-evolution while accepting micro-evolution is tantamount to the belief that, inside every cell, there exists a mechanism that prevents mutations which would give rise to offspring if that offspring could not produce fertile progeny with not just its parents' generation, but its grandparents', great-grandparents', etc, all the way back to the beginning of life itself. There is no logic or scientific research that supports such a conclusion.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
The parent post didn't say he/she thought the whole Bible was just allegorical or poetic; just the creation story as found in Genesis. There are plenty of us Christians who believe that the creation story told in Genesis is simply a simplistic retelling of what happened. For example, the 6 days (+1 of rest) are not actually 24 hours or 1000 years are anything like that - they simply represent periods of time, which could have been millions or billions of years.
Where is this stated? Where in the Bible is this alternate time length mentioned? If it isn't actually mentioned, then wouldn't it be a bit of 'manipulation to fit the argument' to state otherwise?
Why, precisely, are you bending what was written to justify your belief? Or does the question answer itself?
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
You're right that it doesn't disprove god (that would be hard for the same reasons that it's hard to prove the non-existence of unicorns - there's always the chance that you'll discover a unicorn after all) But it does demonstrate that no god is required in the development of life and that the Christian account of things is wrong (sidenote: the *origin* of life is a different thing that we don't have a definite explanation for just yet... but it's getting there)
Really the strongest result science can produce is that there is no need for god, that everything we know about can happen in the absence of god and that if a god exists, he's either too busy with his own stuff to have any effect on us, or that (despite all those godly powers) he's totally irrelevant/inactive.
Once we're at that point, where there's no evidence for god, and nothing left in the "unexplained, might be god" category, it's a fairly small step to say that god probably doesn't exist. Evolution is one step towards that and explains what was previously considered a fairly definitely divine act (creating all the variety and complexity around us), so in that way it's part of the argument against the existence of god.
Species has been defined for lay people as a population that cannot interbreed with others. Biologists know this is too simple, for example, just about any species, considered over multiple generations and not just in the present time, won't fit this rule, and the very word interbreeding is also ambiguous in some cases, (Does a sterile hybred, such as a mule, count as two species successfully interbreeding even though the process can't go a second generation?).
There's another simple but wrong definition in all this: "A single gene codes for a single protein". That one is often used in freshman genetics, and also turns out to have exceptions.
I really wish we could somehow moderate this thread so that the people who don't know these definitions were down about -1, the ones who don't know anything of the exceptions were all at +1, and the ones who are pretty clear on at least that much biology could set their filters accordingly.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm a baptized, confirmed, signed, sealed, and approved Christian.
The fact that you treat it like some sort of club membership shows how little you understand Christianity.
If most of your congregation shares these views, there are some serious problems at your church.
A lot of it is pure voodoo, but there are some decent messages buried in there. Big man in the sky? Probably not.
1 Corinthians 15:14:
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
Small but very important point:
However, we deny that species evolve into other species.
You're overly inclusive. Some Christians deny that. Other Christians don't. It's not a fundamental requirement of Christianity to disbelieve in evolution.
I'm obviously no scientist, but given your references to quantum physics and subatomic particles I'll wager that you are a great deal more familiar with the cold hard facts than I am, so I'll ask you a question: Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?
I'll feed for the hell of it. I have karma to roll and smoke.
First off...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_Genome_Project#Genes_of_the_Chromosome_2_fusion_site
The results of the chimpanzee genome project suggest that when ancestral chromosomes 2A and 2B fused to produce human chromosome 2, no genes were lost from the fused ends of 2A and 2B. At the site of fusion, there is approximately 150,000 base pairs of sequence not found in chimpanzee chromosomes 2A and 2B. Additional linked copies of the PGML/FOXD/CBWD genes exist elsewhere in the human genome, particularly near the p end of chromosome 9. This suggests that a copy of these genes may have been added to the end of the ancestral 2A or 2B prior to the fusion event. It remains to be determined if these inserted genes confer a selective advantage.
Now, your turn.
What does an increase in "information" (another creationist misused term) infer? I'm sure you're not saying that additional genetic data is the only way evolution works. Odd how things like Downs Syndrome, which are damaging, result from an increase of genetic "information", while things like CCR5delta32 (provides near immunity to HIV/AIDS) is actually a decrease in "information".
Of course a decrease in "information" can also be damaging. Fragile X is a prime example of this.
This all comes from another facet of the shining example of a creationist's lack of scientific knowledge. Evolution is not based on "information", it's based on an organism being fit to its environment. More does not always mean better.
I'd get a bit of an education on the subject before pulling questions from Youtube videos.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
"Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous."
Personally, I'd liken that to breeds in dogs, rather than species, if the only thing that's changed is the color to suit an environmental issue. But, it's a helpful jumping off point, so let's push it a bit further and perhaps you'll get a visit from the clue fairy.
The two populations of fish have split off - green and blue. Let's fall them family 1 and family 2.
Family 1 stays by that coral - green fish survive, blue ones die. Family 2 moves off to the blue coral where blue fish live, green ones die.
Now, let's say there is some kind of infestation/earthquake/algal bloom or whatever that ruins family 1's coral, kills it off. F1 now splits again - F11 and F12. F11 is comprised of members that try to make a go of it staying at the coral, and let's say that F11 is mostly made of individuals who are big enough to make predators think twice about attacking them. F12 is mostly made of smaller members who move to a new environment, one in which their small size is an asset to avoiding predators, let's say it's a cave system.
F11 members - the biggish ones that resist predators through size - continue to "breed for size" (of course, they don't know this, it's just that the ones that live long enough to breed are the bigger ones). Over time, they become substantially larger than their old F1 ancestors - and food becomes scarce by the coral source. So some members of F11 - the ones who can range over larger distances for food, let's call them F112 - start to spread out over larger and larger distances to find food. The ones maybe some are more efficient at hoovering up plankton or algae (bigger mouths, maybe slightly more efficient stomachs, whatever) - they become F1121. Others are maybe a little more aggressive and instead of going after nutrients from plants, they actually go after smaller fish that eat plants - so they swallow those little fish and their guts rip up the little fish, releasing the plants the little fish ate (let's call these predators F1122). The F1121's keep on getting bigger, more effective at hoovering up plankton and stuff like that, and more able to just roam for VERY long distances to get their daily meal. So we have F1121 - gigantic vegetarians capable of covering huge distances.
The aggressive ones, the F1122's, something interesting happens to them... One batch (F11221) has a bit of a less discerning gut, one that happens to derive nutrition not just from the plants released from their prey, but also maybe a little bit from the blood of that prey that gets released. At first it's not much, but the ones who are able to do that trick well wind up being just a little more efficient than the ones who can't, and soon F11221's have gotten to the point where they're also able to digest the meat from their prey which is MUCH more efficient than digesting the plants. So F11221's have become basically carnivorous.
The F11222's are the F1122's that aren't as maneuverable. They prefer shallower waters like those nearer to land. They still eat plants, but lots of the plants are on the surface of the water, and some of these guys, it turns out, are able to pull some oxygen from air (not a lot, just a little, just enough to let them stay on the surface eating plants a little longer
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
If I were a Christian, I would hate you and see you as an incredibly bad person. Going around telling people that you don't have to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity to be a Christian is deceitful at best. If I were Christian, I would also do my best to keep my children as far away from you as possible, to prevent you from spreading your lies about there being no God to my children. Atheists, Muslims, even Satanists, would be OK, as I could explain to them that they have a different set of beliefs. You on the other hand claim to have the same basic beliefs.
There is no legislative body that defines MOST words. That doesn't mean that if you say you Tea-bagged someones daughter, that it doesn't mean a very specific act.
Well...as soon as the Protoss bring in their Templars, I'm quite sure humanity won't stand a chance anymore ;P .
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Where is it defined that a day is 24 hours?
seems to a mainstream tendency to describe yourself as 'Christian' despite not believing in, you know, the basic tenets of Christianity.
Think of us as being too lazy to change the default setting on features we don't use.
Might? How is it that a slight mutation could produce anything other than a reduction of fitness (in the short term)? And, fully-functional brains do not just come about all at once (in a single mutation), do they?
In my view, this is one of the single biggest problems with evolutionary theory (and I'm actually quite surprised that you brought it up here).
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
This AC has to be either: 1) a "true" Christian that believes the world is only 7000 years old, evolution is the word of Satan and if I'm not in church at least 4 times each week I'm going to Hell. Or 2) a troll just trying to excite those in group 1 to watch some truly absurd conversation happen.
I, by no means, would qualify under the "traditional" definition of Christian. I'm not even sure that I would choose to use that label due to the bastardization of the true meaning of the original teachings of Jesus et al by those that have been power hungry and have sought to subjigate those that disagreed with them.
However, I would consider myself a follower of Jesus. I don't view him as God as many "Christians" have turned him into. In that respect, I tend to agree with the Islamic perspective that you are worshiping the creation, not the creator. I do find that Jesus' teachings and the central theme of the Bible is one of humility, tolerance and forgiveness, despite what claims the fundamentalists would like to make.
I'm not a theologian by any means. I grew up in a Southern Baptist, almost evangelical, way too close to fundamentalist family. My parents still don't believe that evolution is fact (notice I don't say believe in evolution, as that conveys faith, which is not something scientifically required other than at the most fundamental levels of science - i.e. we have to accept that SOME level of objective reality exists). I've spent much of my life since studying the alternatives. I started with an intense rejection of Christianity around 21 because it just didn't work for me in the fundamentalist form I had learned. I studied, searched and learned about many things I was told to avoid in my youth.
In the end, I found Buddhism to be the most useful for me. I could intellectually rationalize it. It didn't teach me that I was bad or that my doubts were evil. It taught me to be humble, be tolerant of others and to forgive. And, with time, my anger and resentment that had built against Christianity began to temper. I was then able to look again at it with fresh eyes. And I was surprised to find that what I had found in Buddhism was right there in Christianity once I let go of the dogma and searched for the original meaning of the teachings.
That was my journey. And, I believe in the teachings of the Bible. No, I don't believe in all the hocus-pocus, supernatural mumbo jumbo. So, if that makes me unable to call myself a Christian, fine. For me, labels mean nothing and teachings mean nothing if you don't use them. And for those fundamentalist types, you need to go back and read Genesis chapter 3. The original sin was dividing the world into good and evil. It was judging everything as something to be desired or rejected. Perpetuation of that is what causes pain in this world.
And, when you're done reading chapter 3, go back to chapter 1. God created everything. And, when he was finished, he judged it. And, he saw that it ALL was good. Who are you to be saying anything different?
Really?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The idea that the Bible, read literally, is somehow the pinnacle of Christianity is rather new doctrine of a subset of Protestant sects; if you are going to exclude people from the group "Christian" on the basis of their beliefs about the Bible, excluding those who adhere to to the doctrine of a literal, inerrant Bible that is the sum of general revelation (and who, therefore, worship a book) rather than those who do not would make more sense.
Maybe the 'magical force' you are looking for is 'entropy'?
Well, most mutations have no effect on fitness whatsoever. Others are completely catastrophic and that individual dies. No biggie.
I don't understand "How is it that a slight mutation could produce anything other than a reduction of fitness". A slight change in the shape of a fin could make the difference between being first or second to that scarce piece of food. The evolutionary pressure in this case is the scarcity of food. If food is plentiful, that particular advantage is immaterial. It's all about place and time.
Of course fully functional brains don't come about all at once. They evolved from the clusters of nerves that tell creatures how to move and react to their surroundings. Do you have a problem seeing how an organism with three cells to run its 'reacting to stimulus' algorithm could be fitter than one with two? (assuming there's no scarcity fuel for that cell). Many brain / nerve cluster mutations will merely be a slight change in the firing rate of a single neuron.
I'm a bit alarmed at your suggestion that proponents of evolution would suppress concepts for fear their argument would be weakened. That's ID territory. Scientists *want* to explore every angle.
....Probably - over a few hundred million years.....
Probably is a statistical word. Do you have an idea what the probability is that a fish can evolve into a horse? I'll give you a hint. Your probability of winning next 23 consecutive lotteries is significantly higher than that a fish will evolve into a horse. The probability of another planet existing in the universe that can support intelligent life is about the same. Mathematicians consider any probability less than about 1 in 10^-42 equal to zero.
All theory is gray
... life on Earth, not life in "the universe"....
How is there any difference? There is plenty of evidence that the laws of physics are pretty uniform throughout the observable universe. Therefore, any life form subject to these laws would have to be based on a carbon atom, as it is here on earth. This is especially true of any life form that could reasonably bear the label "intelligent".
All theory is gray
If I were a Christian, I would hate you and see you as an incredibly bad person.
No, if you were the kind of Christian you apparently think most people are, you would hate me and see me as an incredibly bad person. The only thing your post does is define what you think a real Christian is. What you define as the basic tenets of Christianity are not necessarily the basic tenets to everyone else. It's a huge religion with many followers and many different interpretations.
There is no legislative body that defines MOST words. That doesn't mean that if you say you Tea-bagged someones daughter, that it doesn't mean a very specific act.
I'm simply holding that the true core tenet of Christianity is following the teachings of Christ, and not necessarily all of them, and not necessarily the teachings of all the other people who built their faith around him. More people who call themselves Christians will fit my definition than will fit yours. Doesn't that make it a better definition?
The best answer that a practiced scientist and atheist can give on the spot is that some higher form of life evolved and then populated the earth with life. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design. He answered NOTHING, but merely moved the issue to another planet. It is circular reasoning.
Yeah, okay. And how is saying "god did it" any different? If ID is supposed to be an intelligent answer to the origins of life, you can't relegate how god himself came into existence to mysticism. You can't say "well, it doesn't matter" or "well, he always existed".
That's why ID is a pile of junk. If you say that man COULD NOT have come into existence without a creator, because he is complex and intelligent, then you also have to agree that god himself COULD NOT have come into existence without a creator.
ID is basically saying, "well, some forms of life need a creator, but others don't. we get to pick which is which."
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
But there are examples of subsets of a species that when separated over time become unable to interbreed. In GP's scenario, the fish became unable to interbreed with the original species. for a real world example, see CASE HISTORIES OF SPECIATION I&II .
There is also the issue of ring species in which one subset (A) can breed with a nearby subset (B), and subset (B) can interbreed with a third subset (C), but subset (A) cannot interbreed with subset (C).
This blurs the line between species, as, by the popular definition of species, varieties A and B are the same species, and varieties B and C are the same species, but A and C are two different species.
Pretty sure the ancient Hebrew words the writers used originally mean 24 hours, or more loosely, a day is equal to the span of time wherein one period of day followed by a period of night. So your answer is the definition of the word used by the original writers -- who I am sure would not have called it a day if that's not what they meant. Had they meant "indeterminate amount of time", they probably would have wrote that.
And if you can't trust the original authors, whooo boy, I don't even need to point out the problem there, do I?
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
I think your response was very even-handed, and I think you did cut to the essentials of the Christian belief system from an etic, objective point of view.
The only thing I take issue with is the idea that that is actually how the world works. Not everyone who calls themselves Christian will follow your formula. The culture of Christianity is much wider than the list of rules you made, and cultural affiliations are choices people make individually.
To tell someone they are not Christian because they don't believe in Hell, even if they go to a Christian church and were raised in a Christian family, celebrate Christian holidays, wear a cross, pray to Jesus, etc. is ludicrous.
Christianity = MYTH people.
Way to take one part of the bible, written by one guy and apply your reasoning to every other part, written by many other authors in many other styles. Some parts of the bible are story retellings, others are Historical accounts, census results, and books of poetry. Creation Story may = Myth, Chritianity, however != Myth
If I were a Christian, I would hate you and see you as an incredibly bad person.
If you were a Christian, you would love him, you would fear for his mortal soul, and you would pray for him regularly.
The fish that had descendants that were some fish and some amphibians were very different from both sets of their descendants. (This isn't required, but that's how it happened.)
During the evolution of amphibians into reptiles, there existed many intermediate species, that if they still survived today would cause classification problems. That one was a transition with lots of intermediate steps. Lots of the transition species still survive, but they tend to get grouped into "amphibian". Salamanders aren't that similar to frogs... But then consider the Axotyl, which is almost an intermediate between an amphibian and a fish. (It generally never passes from the "tadpole" stage to the adult stage...but instead becomes a sexually active "child". So it never turns into an air-breather, even though it looks more like a lizard.)
If you doubt evolution, then you are merely displaying your evidence unless you have a different explanation for millions of disparate pieces of evidence. You could be displaying skepticism, but only if you also doubt all competing theories.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hey! No using logic! That's not fair!
You are like the person who insists that they are a vegetarian, and just happens to eat meat at every meal. Then think that it is a valid label because lots of other meat eaters call themselves vegetarians too.
Your saying that posers and wannabes have completely Usurped the word Christian. Because by your definition, Atheists, Muslims and Satanist can be Christians too. It has no meaning when you say it because it no longer labels anything.
Sorry, but most of the lung-fish have gone extinct. The teleosts use their thing that turned into a lung as a swim-bladder, to achieve neutral buoyancy. Not to say they couldn't evolve into air breathers. (Check with the Florida "Walking Catfish".) Just saying that the path taken would be very different, and thus the "air-breathing rapid runner with homeostatic thermal controls" would be very different from a horse. And probably wouldn't look *that* much like a horse. (Consider the difference between horses and kangaroos, both of which fill approximately similar ecological niches.)
Remember that evolution works by rejecting the most inferior of the available choices. As long as any of them are *good enough*, some will survive. Next time the land animals might end up as hexapods. Quadrupeds might be better, but if there aren't any available to choose, they won't be selected. (OTOH, apparently the original amphibians had a variable number of toes, and five ended up being selected as optimal. But this was a trimming down from a larger number. [Well, the toes are from the bones of an ancestral lungfish's fins, and so are all of the other tarsals. They weren't originally arranged in parallel.]) Still, I find it difficult to believe that four feet are sufficiently better than six that once six had become established, four would have been sufficiently better WHEN IT ORIGINALLY APPEARED to oust the six foot presence...or to even continue to persist. So now we could develop into centaurs and angels...of a sort. (For other reasons, the "angels" would need to be about the size of a bat.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hello! what is the definition of an alien? God, angels, demons, and whatever other spiritual creatures are ALIENS!!! Richard Dawkins is right but he doesn't understand the true implications of his own answer.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
The only condition to classify oneself as a Christian is the belief that Christ died on the cross to forgive our sins and give us everlasting life. That's it. I am also a Christian who happens to believe in evolution and I take the Bible very loosely rather than literally. I believe that the Bible was inspired by God and not the literal word of God, because the latter can't be written into any human dialect. You lose something in the translation.
I do have friends who believe the universe was literally created in seven days, and I happen to think that is ludicrous (and impossible, since days are measured in units of rotations of the earth, which hadn't been created yet). So whether a "day" to God is a microsecond or a millennium, it doesn't matter to me. When I read "God said 'let there be light'", I read it as "God made the Big Bang". When I read that God created Adam from dust, I read it as "God set evolution in motion from the primordial soup and eventually humans came into being."
Believe me, fundamentalists who say that the earth is 6000 years old or that dinosaurs never existed annoy me as much as they do you, but to say that I'm less of a Christian for taking the Bible as words of inspiration rather than literal truth is flat out incorrect.
Actually, if I remember my anthro correctly, Genesis is formed from the munging together of at least two other creation myths. One was Babylonian, and I don't remember where the other came from. Egypt, possibly. (Not the one about Ptah, though.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, that is Dawkins' answer to Intelligent Design. This is not a reference to anything pertaining to evolution. Stein asked how ID could be applied to science, and the ONLY way is if alien life (intelligent) seeded Earth (design). Why is this the only answer? Because a deity is not science. Your God is not scientifically verifiable. Therefore it (and anything pertaining to it... your Bible, creationism, cdesign proponentists, etc.) cannot be a scientific answer to anything.
ID does not say anything of deities. The point is that the activity of intelligent design is detectable. And, in fact, that is a point that Dawkins' apparently now concedes by his mentioning of the plausibility of the detection of evidence of panspermia. Dawkins is only more comfortable with panspermia than with theism due to already held beliefs about the non-existence of God (which is a prime example of what many proponents of evolution have done over the years--they start with 1 - 'God cannot possibly [or does not measurably] exist and thus cannot have created life on earth', and build a system of reason upon that). But, they have failed to consider that if you change your first axiom to something more like this:
things get very interesting very quickly.
And for further reference, Stein was referring to life on Earth, not life in "the universe", something that IDists do not believe in either.
Well, I'm an 'ID theorist' and I have no idea what you just said we do not believe in. As I said before, there are considerable numbers of ID theorists who believe in panspermia (and reasonbly so) and the rest make no conclusion about alien life at all (as that is currently beyond the scope of ID theory which is concerned with detecting intelligent activity and not with speculation about the designer's (or designers') identity). That is not to say that the question of the designers' identity is beyond science, but it's a little early in the game for such speculation, I think.
If you truly believe that, let me ask you one thing--
How did evolution take place for millions or billions of years without many generations of animals? Genesis is very clear in that death did not exist until sin entered the world (which happened with fully mature animals all around).
Also, by all estimates, a catastrophic life-ending asteroid hits earth on average every 100 millions years. So, for any evolutionary theory to fit, it must happen in that timeframe and not a larger one. Even evolutionists admit that is not enough time to produce what we currently see.
One. It's already happened.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
....Rather, we see the creation story in Genesis to be allegorical and poetic....
Do you see everything around you, including yourself, your own existence as allegorical and poetic? Most of us, perceive the world as real and tangible, as being really here, not just a program in some computer or a metaphorical poem. If God did not create the world, as we read in Genesis 1, then it must have created itself, which of course is logically absurd. The eternal existence of the universe is what was believed by Darwin and his contemporaries and those that lived before him.
Modern science has much evidence that space-time, matter and energy have not always existed. Present evidence screams loudly that the universe is not eternal, but had a definite beginning. If you accept the law of cause and effect, then the universe must have a cause, a first cause. The Bible calls his first cause "Elohim", a Hebrew word with a plural ending. We have translated this word as "God". The prophet Isaiah tells us that this God exists in eternity, that is outside of our time space universe. Genesis simply tells us that this eternal uncaused God is the creator of everything that exists. Since no scientists was around to observe the creation event and the events immediately thereafter, we have to BELIEVE the evidence still available from the distant past.
In a court of law, the testimony of an eyewitness has great importance. Witnesses are generally assumed to be truthful, unless it can be unambiguously shown that a witness is lying or untrustworthy. Witness testimony is, more often than not, the deciding factor in the outcome of a court case, circumstantial evidence notwithstanding.
Contrary to every paper on evolution I have ever read, the creation account in the Bible does not contain uncertainty phrases such as, it is believed that, it appears to be that, the commonly accepted view is, and other such weasel constructs. The Bible in general and the creation account in particular present straightforward statements claimed to originate with the One who was there and did the work. The Bible provides direct testimony from the creator Himself, whereas all of evolution's so called evidence is at best inferred and circumstantial. The question you, as part of the jury must decide is whether to BELIEVE the witness or some circumstantial evidence gathered after the fact. In the end, it all comes down to belief.
All theory is gray
Were the first fish of which you speak fish, or were they not fish? If they were, then by your own admission I was right; fish evolved into amphibians. If they weren't, why did you call them fish?
Did I say otherwise? You, along with several others, seem to have have read a "direct" or "overnight" or "in one step" where none was written. Also, you said some fish had offspring that were amphibians. Why then did some amphibians not have offspring that were reptiles? If one transition happened through intermediates, why not the other?
What possible grounds do you have for that accusation?
Assuming I wished to disprove evolution (which I don't, anyone with a room temeprature IQ in centigrade could work that out) what else would one do with evidence? Hide it? Compase a symphony about it? Make it into a soufflé?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd say that we are not really able to evaluate how complex the evolution of intelligence is since it obviously (realisation based on Slashdot comments) hasn't developed very far yet.
... I just believe that it is not a fully accurate description of what happened....
Of course it is not a FULLY accurate description of what God did because that is not the purpose of the Bible, His communication to mankind. It is however accurate as far as it goes.
If God had wanted to give us a fully accurate description of everything he created, several thousand Library of Congress would be too small to hold all the details of creation. The bottom line is this: God created the universe and everything in it out of nothing. He left it as a challenge to human scientists to try and figure out the details.
All theory is gray
...So the bible is fact until science disproves some part of it,...
Which so far has never happened yet. Of course many theories (beliefs) of scientists and others contradict what is written in the Bible. So far though, no actual FACT of science has ever contradicted anything written scriptures. The interpretation of these facts is the only thing that ever differs, not the facts in and of themselves.
All theory is gray
You are like the person who insists that they are a vegetarian, and just happens to eat meat at every meal.
No, I am not. First of all, I am not a Christian, I'm just defending a viewpoint. Secondly, that's a terrible analogy. Your analogy would work if I said that someone in the Christian culture could exclusively go to a Hindu temple, pray to Hindu gods, and celebrate Hindu holidays while still accurately calling themselves Christian. But that's not what I said or meant, and that should be clear.
Your saying that posers and wannabes have completely Usurped the word Christian. Because by your definition, Atheists, Muslims and Satanist can be Christians too. It has no meaning when you say it because it no longer labels anything.
My definition is that someone who follows the teachings of Christ at least in portion and identifies themselves as Christian should be considered a member of the Christian faith and culture. A member of any of the other cultural groups you listed (atheist, Muslim, Satanist) could become a Christian as well, by identifying themselves as Christian, participating in Christian groups (including their own families), and being accepted by those groups.
I'm saying that faith is cultural, it's not a checklist.
..I have a star atop my Christmas tree. But I'm still an atheist...
If someone claiming to be God knocked on the door of your dwelling, what evidence would such a person have to provide to convince you that such claim was true? If you slam the door in such a person's face and they came in anyway, right through the wall, what other evidence would you require?
All theory is gray
.... but why is it necessary for it to be anything more than one attempt at explaining that which is out of scope of our experience.....
But why is it necessary for EVOLUTION to be anything more than one MORE attempt at explaining that which is out of scope of our experience? After all, nobody has ever seen the reptile becomes bird evolution myth happen, as commonly depicted in every science textbook. Yet, dyed in the wool evolutionists sincerely BELIEVE that their explanation is the right one. They attempt to get around this problem by postulating the magic of time, immense periods of time.
All theory is gray
The probability that a fish species can evolve into a horse species can only be 1 or 0, since it either can or it can't (hint: it's not zero). However the probability that a fish species will evolve into a horse species is quite small, but again not zero. Also, since we don't have the technology to accurately observe extrasolar planets, we have no idea the likelihood that other planets could support intelligent life; however, given the size of the universe, I would expect it to actually be fairly large that there is at least one other planet similar to ours.
Christians do not deny MICRO-evolution.
There is no such thing as macroevolution. What we perceive as macroevolution is the result of millions of steps of microevolution plus the fact that paleontology only provides a few snapshots of a continuous process.
As soon as you have a detailed set of data the issue goes away. It has recently been shown that the human skeleton has evolved quite a bit over the last few thousand years but hardly anyone noticed.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If you believe that, you don't understand the history of science. The exact *opposite* has been happening since the scientific method was established. Every new discovery pushes back the boundaries of what we consider "religion". Remember, before germ theory, there was a time when people thought illnesses were curses sent down by angry gods.
I think you misunderstood me here. I meant the further we go on the further we realise there are... "cosmic balances" out there. Things happen for a reason. Explinations for those reasons are up to you. Personally I like to believe that there is some sort of collective intelligence, delicately moving things forward. The composition of atoms themselves, I guess.
I'm sorry, what's your point? Just because we don't have an explanation, doesn't meant that an invisible Man in the Sky is the answer. In fact, given the history of religion as a theoretical and explanatory framework, I'd argue we should be avoiding these kinds of appeals to the supernatural, as they've invariably turned out to be wrong.
For people who should never be pessimists, for people who must always remember it can be done, you're fairly angry and hateful when it comes to things like this.
I especially love the "Inivisible Man in the Sky". Since when was "God" an "Invisible Man in the Sky"?
I love how we have no explanation for the creation of the universe other than either:
- Everything suddenly appeared from an explosion triggered by nothing in a world of nothing
- "A wizard did it"
And yet you quickly jump to discredit anything but your own theory. That is not science; you've entered politics. Science would not rage and rage at it like some bible-thumping baptist. Real scientists would provide a reasonable theory or provide nothing at all and simply try to figure things out. Neither theory makes sense. Don't pretend that yours is any different.
Except, here's the thing: There's really no biblical source of "God piled some stuff on a rock and called it Earth, and then shit happened, and then the universe was there. Bam!". If anything the bible is a guide to philosophy that just didn't quite turn out right.
By accepting that there is no random, that things happen for a reason (pressures of whatever sort)... Then you are effectively agreeing with me. That was my point. A fish doesn't start to grow wings and fly, unless it has some reason to. I'm not saying the fish only grows wings and starts to fly because "God wills it!", but rather that there is some form of "intelligence" (likely the fish itself) pushing it to grow wings.
Remember, before germ theory, there was a time when people thought illnesses were curses sent down by angry gods.
Remember kids, the people who rushed half-baked theories to create sterile environments for you. Isn't life grand?
Of course, who the hell am I kidding. Modern science has become politics, and it's especially depressing when you've got the media thinking they know something.
(I am a skeptic, of everything, and always will be.)
If someone claiming to be God knocked on the door of your dwelling, what evidence would such a person have to provide to convince you that such claim was true? If you slam the door in such a person's face and they came in anyway, right through the wall, what other evidence would you require?
That's the weirdest question I've ever been asked. Let's face it, it's never going to happen.
I can't think of any conjuring trick that would convince me - walking through a wall is hardly on a par with, you know, creating the whole universe.
But presumably an omnipotent being, who wanted to, could simply rewire my brain to make me believe anything he wanted me to believe.
....By reserving the Christian label for people who believe in the Christian faith, you can demonstrate that the rest of us are decent people too.....
Jesus himself gave a very simple test plan which outsiders could determine who is and who is not a Christian, that is a disciple of Jesus.
(Joh 13:34) I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. As I have loved you, you should also love one another.
(Joh 13:35) By this all shall know that you are My disciples, if you have love toward one another.
For a good description of what this love looks like, read 1 Corinthians 13.
It is impossible for any person to have this kind of love in them unless they are in-dwelt and empowered by the Spirit of God which Jesus Christ has gives to all who put their complete trust and confidence into Him.
Rom 8:9 But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.
Anyone who does not have the Holy Spirit of God living within may still label him or herself a Christian, but is not considered to be such by God. Someone may be a good and decent person, at least as far as is possible to tell from external behavior, but that by itself is not sufficient for God to consider such a one as one of His own.
All theory is gray
I should have been more specific. I was referring to slight mutations in the progression towards a fully functional complex sub system. The problem with this 'theory' is that the subsystem must remain functional at every stage and slight mutations must offer substantial benefit in order for the individual to dominate the species. This domination seems quite unlikely to me to result from slight modifications (mods which are far more likely to be detrimental as your OP pointed out).
As for ID-- it seems to me that the science has become more dogmatic, intellectually dishonest, and hypocritical than the Catholic church ever dreamt of. They have become greater than their successor in they very ways that they so stood against.
I'm not a creationist, but I'll try to put their position as charitably as I can, and answer your question, since I do believe it is flawed.
Creationists tend to make a distinction between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," precisely in response to what you're pointing out. In effect, any sort of natural selection that can be demonstrated in the present-day, over short term timescales, they label "microevolution" and do not contest. Basically, modern creationism involves accepting that natural selection can turn gray moths into black moths or produce antibiotic tolerance in bacteria, but can't turn fish into people (either not at all, or over the time range claimed by evolutionists).
Put very succintly, the most advanced kinds of creationism don't attack the principle of natural selection; they attack the theory of common descent of all living things, and the theory of abiogenesis. So, the creationist doesn't need to posit anything that stops natural selection from happening, nor to deny self-organization that can be observed in the lab. They just need to attack the idea that natural selection or other forms of self-organization can explain the range of variation that we observe in the natural world in terms of common descent.
Or even simpler: your argument assumes that, given some forms of self-organization that you point out, that these necessarily and inexorably lead toward forms of life as we observe them today, unless something external to the system steps in to stop this from happening. This assumption is just wrong; you have shown us nothing that guarantees that the specific forms of self-organization that you mention can lead to the observed outcome in the timeframe in question. (And in fact, I'd claim that that undertakement would be hopeless.)
It's really best to tackle creationists on politics, not on science. Evolutionary theory (and natural science in general) isn't a completed edifice, so there will always be weaknesses that an informed person will be able to exploit to cast doubt on it. Creationists will always be able to point at genuine weaknesses in evolutionary theory; the problem is that they're singling out evolutionary theory for political and religious reasons, and it's far more important to address those reasons.
Are you adequate?
A slight genetic change may not result a slight change in results, and vice versa. And any mututation is extremely unlikely to result in anything other than a reduction in fitness; most mutations are either without outward effect or fatal. With a sufficiently large population and a sufficiently large time, the chance of eventually getting a beneficial mutation increases to the point of being reasonable.
Uh, no. But once you have creatures with simple brains -- which have some utility -- incremental increases in particular capacities could come as small mutations.
What "problem" are you referring to?
When Emacs reaches sentience in a few years, it will offer yet another kind of specimen to test.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't worry guy, seems slashdot isn't the realm for intellectuals it used to be.
I keep trying to tell my boss the same thing: I don't want money so much, but maybe a cubicle next to the prettiest babe in the office, or maybe a quad-core.
Table-ized A.I.
A slight genetic change may not result a slight change in results, and vice versa. And any mututation is extremely unlikely to result in anything other than a reduction in fitness; most mutations are either without outward effect or fatal. With a sufficiently large population and a sufficiently large time, the chance of eventually getting a beneficial mutation increases to the point of being reasonable.
Two problems with that-- 1) 100 million years (the average time between catastrophic asteroid collisions with earth) is not nearly enough time to produce the current scenario. 2) Even a beneficial mutation must be so beneficial that it entirely dominates a given species. What if the species is already quite populous? It seems that such beneficial mutations would be few and far between and would simply die out before dominating a given species.
And, fully-functional brains do not just come about all at once (in a single mutation), do they?
Uh, no. But once you have creatures with simple brains -- which have some utility -- incremental increases in particular capacities could come as small mutations.
A problem with that too (in addition to the second problem above)-- Just where do you get these simple brains which have some utility? Until these clumps of cells become a functional brain, they are a detriment instead of a benefit and thus not advantageous to pass on to successive generations. Natural selection can only 'select' from a number of changes to an *existing* functional system--it cannot be the force which creates the system to begin with.
In my view, this is one of the single biggest problems with evolutionary theory (and I'm actually quite surprised that you brought it up here).
What "problem" are you referring to?
The 'chicken and egg' problem so to speak.
...given the size of the universe, I would expect it to actually be fairly large that there is at least one other planet similar to ours....
That would SEEM to be true until you balance it against all the parameters that have to be correct in order for a planet that can support intelligent life to come into existence by any unplanned means.
If you want to learn more about this you can read this book:
ISBN-13: 978-0895260659
or if you don't like to read watch this DVD.
http://www.amazon.com/Privileged-Planet-John-Rhys-Davies/dp/B0002E34C0
Life is we know it, must have water in liquid form. That implies a very narrow temperature range. In addition to temperature, the chemical and physical necessities of life are very specific and quite narrow. This is especially true of any intelligent life forms that could exist to observe and try to understand the universe.
When all these factors are evaluated and balanced against the billions and billions of stars and galaxies, the probability of another earth-like planet in the entire universe coming into existence by any statistical, unplanned process, not involving intelligence is so tiny as to be essentially zero.
All theory is gray
When people make a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, they generally are not talking about the minutia of what might constitute a new species. They are generally more concerned with things like the origins of new organs and systems, or the transformation of one type of organ into an entirely different type of organ. In almost all of these cases we don't know what the intermediate steps were, or if there were intermediate steps.
To me, the current explanations available for these types of changes (as opposed to changes that clearly lend themselves to incremental changes, like body parts changing in size, for which we also happen to have abundant factual evidence of the intermediate steps having existed), ring hollow to the point of seeming almost ridiculous. So by my account, macroevolution has yet to be explained. As for God, He gets full credit for macroevolution and microevolution alike, so I don't see where He need come in to the question.
A magical force called entropy. The same force that makes most those things happen -- it makes things tend toward lower energy states. Let me know when you observe peptides arranging themselves into a life form. I'd be very interested in watching that. Since it "would take a god to stop", it shouldn't be too hard to arrange.
Well, to an extent I agree with you. However, there is one hole in this argument. To hear the way you just stated it, and the way Dawkins states it, there should be evolved life forms EVERYWHERE. I mean, it is so almost guaranteed to happen given enough (billions) years. Therefore, we should see life forms on the surface of the sun that are uniquely adapted to live there. Also, in the vacuum of space. And certainly most planets. So where are all the life forms? You have to admit, that question presents a challenge for your position.
That is an irrational answer. He's basically saying that if God seeded life on earth, then science would therefore become useless for understanding that life. He's as bad as the worst of the creationists. He's co-opting and perverting science to support his emotion-based belief system -- in his case the belief in the non-existence of God.
....If you hold a lottery ticket that can issue new copies of itself with more favorable numbers, what does that do for your "odds"?....
Absolutely nothing, unless that magic lottery ticket can accurately predict the future. Human beings can do quite a few amazing things, but are singularly bad at predicting the future. If that were not true, we would not now be in a recession with hundreds of thousands of unemployed.
As an electronics engineer I probably know more than most /.ers about positive and negative feedback systems. Any system with positive feedback as to be carefully controlled by intelligent means, or it will break into oscillation and be entirely useless for transmitting any sort of information or most anything else. If you have ever been subject to the excruciating howl of a public address system, you have experienced an example of positive feedback.
It is a basic mathematical fact that any positive feedback in any system can easily cause such a system to become unstable to the point of even destroying or at least severely damaging it.
All theory is gray
Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
Yes, these are the pointy-haired managers we all work for.
Parts of the bible are poetical. Parts of the bible are literal historic fact. All of the bible contains underlying spiritual truth written in the representational language that was common in pre-ancient times. If chapter 1 of Genesis were written for the purpose of describing the origin of physical land, oceans, the sun and stars, it never would have been considered sacred in the first place. It is sacred because it describes the human soul, its creation, and its development.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/swd/ac/ac001.htm
You do the same thing. If you say "nature created life" it begs the question "who created nature?" To the Greek philosophers, almost unanimously, the "more sensible hypothesis" was that for something finite and changeable (which everything in the universe clearly is) to exist, it must have its origin in something infinite and unchangeable. Call it Theos, Logos, Tao, or God. But to Pythagoras, Plato et al, it was an absolute logical requisite.
...could simply rewire my brain to make me believe anything he wanted me to believe...
So if you've programmed or someone else programmed your computer to display an expression of love of the computer for you, would you believe that said computer truly loves you?
God tells us in the Bible that he wants you to love him. Obviously he could reprogram you, but then could any response you make to him be labeled with the word "love" as we commonly understand it? You obviously cannot love somebody who you believe does not even exist.
The questions of authentication and identification are not really all that academic, but are crucial in all of life. If you receive a message, especially an improbable message from an improbable source, at least according to your present knowledge, how can you determine the authenticity of both the message and its source?
If the Bible truly is a message from God, is there any way we could be reasonably sure that it is just that and not some huge fraud? In computers, for example, authentication involves something you know or something you have or both, which the computer can unambiguously associate with you. What knowledge could ONLY God provide that you personally or anybody else generally would accept as sufficient evidence of authenticity?
All theory is gray
This kind of hand-waving (Oh, some of them "figured out" how to get o2 from air. Some of them "happened to" derive nutrients from meat) would make for mediocre science fiction at best. It doesn't make for any kind of SCIENCE. While this sounds a little more plausible than saying, "fish A just happened to give live birth to a monkey," it isn't any more scientifically sound. Scientific evidence is strong for the common descent of the species. But those who pretend to any real understanding of the mechanisms of macroevolution are unfit of the label of "scientist".
As Daniel J. Boorstin said, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge."
You think "light" in Genesis is talking about photons? One Christian to another, I suggest you might not be giving Genesis its due. In Samuel 2:22, where it says, "You are my lamp, O LORD; the LORD turns my darkness into light," is that light talking about photons or a more profound kind of light? I think it's the same kind of light being discussed in Genesis 1, where, for example, it says, "God set [great lights] in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth... and to separate light from darkness." After all, it says, "God saw that the light was good". It is spiritual light that is good; natural light is indifferent.
Sure, the physical sense of the creation story is there. But I think it is incidental to the message that the story was written to convey.
....you are both evil and stupid....
Do you not know yet, that when you personally attack the messenger, rather than the message you have lost all credibility? Don't be calling people names just because you disagree with them.
All theory is gray
Actually the Drake equation has held for some time that not only is it likely that planets similar to ours (i.e. capable of supporting life as we know it) will arise, but so will life on those planets.
The most sensible hypothesis is the simplest (if you want a mathematically precise version of that statement see, for example, http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/papers/ockham.pdf). I have not heard that any god is a simpler, more likely configuration of atoms (or whatever gods are made of) than nature. Nor have I heard that the Greek philosophers were the last word on biology or physics.
But that's not really relevant here. What's relevant is the difference between (1) admitting that you don't know something and don't yet have the technology that will permit the necessary experiments and (2) bullshitting a "logical requirement" and inferring something based on wishful thinking.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Of course I hand-waved through a few hundred thousand generations of slight improvement; this is slashdot, not a formal dissertation and defense. I will cheerfully stipulate that the 5 minutes I spent writing the post you're criticizing is not remotely scientific and serves only to illustrate (in very, very rough form) what some people mean when they talk about evolution. I don't agree that "figuring out" (forgive my anthropomorphizing - I'm a folksy kinda gal when I write off the cuff) how to slowly, over the course of many, many generations, glean some O2 from air instead of water is as absurd as "fish gives birth to monkey," but why quibble? Also, I don't really call myself a "scientist" (except on my income tax - under the occupation heading I like to write "I am a scientist.") - just a person taking part in a discussion. Certainly I never said that my post was absolute scientific truth, and I honestly doubt that any reasonable person reading it could honestly come to the conclusion that I was somehow stating that my post was presented as such.
I did find the quote you chose to post at the end pretty odd. I'm not aware that I claimed to *know* anything with absolute certainty, but also, I wonder, have you been applying that same kind of standard to people arguing against evolution? I'm thinking of people who make bald assertions that the Bible has any kind of divine provenance or "underlying spiritual truth" are generally trying to make the claim that they *know* something with certainty. I'm sure someone with your high standards for requiring evidence and lack of tolerance for hand-waving would agree that all sides of this particular argument should be held to the same standards, no?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I'll speak as an agnostic, but one trying to find common ground with you. Which Creation is more amazing, one which needs constant meddling to achieve the desired behavior like a child managing his toy cars on their pitiful tracks, or one which was designed in a moment of time and works autonomously by a very simple set of rules and yet develops endlessly into more and more intricate creatures and behaviors and thoughts? If the Bible were divinely inspired, then surely the verse about "a day to Him is an eon to us" applies to the Seven Days theory as well. By that reckoning, it took billions of our years to cross His Five Days (Big Bang, Stars and Planets, Seas and Plants, Clear Atmosphere, and Complex Animals), we are currently in Day Six (the Day of Man), and we await Day Seven (Extinction) as described in Revelation.
[
You think "light" in Genesis is talking about photons? One Christian to another, I suggest you might not be giving Genesis its due. In Samuel 2:22, where it says, "You are my lamp, O LORD; the LORD turns my darkness into light," is that light talking about photons or a more profound kind of light?
You see, this is precisely the point I was making: two people can read the exact same passage and get two completely different meanings! Which is exactly why I see the Bible as a source of inspirational thought rather than a source of literal meaning.
But to answer your question: I guess I take the "let there be light" in with the rest of the chapter (separating heavens from earth, etc.) to give it a more celestial meaning, although I definitely see your point.
Also keep in mind: the translations of the Bible into English are still very much in dispute even today (another reason to not take the words literally!), and so it's possible that only one English word (light) is available to represent two different Hebrew words, much like English has only "free" where other languages have "libre" and "gratis" (speech vs. beer).
Mathematicians consider any probability less than about 1 in 10^-42 equal to zero. Like most of the rest of your coment this is false.
Hint: 1 in 10^-42 does not mean what you think it means.
Anyway, 1 in 10^42 can become vary likely if roll the dice enough times.
PS: Your making a mistake by only concidering the specific outcome not the range of outcomes that are similar. There are more than 10^20000 ways to make a horse which can breed with other horses.
I agree. I read this entire thread and I'm still not sure what the original article is about:)
Guess I should just skip the slashdot thread and read the original article from now on.
What I've learned, through experimentation with open ended evolution by computer simulation, is that evolution will take a random path towards no particular goal as long as reproduction remains successful. If, however, there is an added parameter to maintaining survival, a particular evolutionary response (linear on average) will result. In extraordinarily simple self replicating machines, the process is nearly immediate, since it is necessary, but in more advanced systems, there is a great deal of redundancy and seemingly dormant code can "reactivate" to allow the organism to persevere. Also, interestingly, it is very common for complementary pairs of "genetic" code to form which each disallows the other from mutating. It is only when both of these is coincidentally mutated in the correct way that either of them can be changed successfully. This is a very natural, very common process, which acts as an error correcting mechanism very similar to that of a checksum. http://novaconceptions.blogspot.com/
No, I'm quite aware that some people think that ID is a valid theory. The problem is, they're wrong. The "evidence" they base it on consists mainly of a mis-understanding of the idea of "information" (the genetic code is information, which they mistakenly think implies intelligence), and an appeal to credulity in the form of the concept of irreducible complexity. Both are severely flawed, and fail to provide a reasonable foundation for a scientific theory.
As for "Dawkins let the panspermia cat out of the bag", that's just nonsense. Panspermia has been suggested millions of times before, and what he said was nothing new. Theorizing about the implications of a hypothesis doesn't automatically give any credence to the hypothesis in question, despite your assertion. I can say "if unicorns existed, jousting matches in medieval times would have been very different" without admitting "scientific status" re the existence of unicorns.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
It's quite easy to interpret the Genesis story as more than pure allegory, and for evolution to be part of the process as well... just look at the actual account: "Let the land produce vegetation; Let the water teem with living creatures; Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds"
....Probably - over a few hundred million years.....
Probably is a statistical word. Do you have an idea what the probability is that a fish can evolve into a horse?
A fish can evolve into a horse like creature that is a FACT if you take evolution as a FACT
The likely hood of a fish evolving into a horse like creature is however very low even given a suitable environment and a few million years
It is however a impossibility that a fish can evolve into a specific species that already exists without impossible amounts of interbreeding with extinct creatures which would not be evolution
null
Hence, the bible belt.
Evolution theory isn't needed there because their genetic mutations are a direct result of inbreeding.
If someone claiming to be God knocked on the door of your dwelling, what evidence would such a person have to provide to convince you that such claim was true? If you slam the door in such a person's face and they came in anyway, right through the wall, what other evidence would you require?
How would I know that this person isn't Satan? Or a "phase-shifting" alien, or a good magician, or the product of those "magic" mushrooms I was slipped, etc ...
You can get to the Atlantic from Chicago by boat, so I want to agree. On the other hand, Chicago really isn't really part of an oceanic coast is it?
Also, by all estimates, a catastrophic life-ending asteroid hits earth on average every 100 millions years. So, for any evolutionary theory to fit, it must happen in that timeframe and not a larger one. Even evolutionists admit that is not enough time to produce what we currently see.
You do realize that there's a difference between ending some kinds of life and ending all life, right? Life doesn't have to start from scratch after every impact.
I should have been more specific. I was referring to slight mutations in the progression towards a fully functional complex sub system. The problem with this 'theory' is that the subsystem must remain functional at every stage and slight mutations must offer substantial benefit in order for the individual to dominate the species. This domination seems quite unlikely to me to result from slight modifications (mods which are far more likely to be detrimental as your OP pointed out).
I disagree that about the need for "substantial" benefit. Very small advantages become significant across large populations and long time periods. If an individual has 0.0001% better survival prospects than its brothers, and has 1000 offspring with the same advantage, then that strain stands an excellent chance of surviving, and quite possibly (though not necessarily) dominating the species.
You seem to be giving the 'half an eye is no use' argument an airing, except with brains, or some other feature - and you treat it as a dirty little secret the 'evolutionists' brush under the carpet. *That's* intellectual dishonesty. The question has been answered over and over again, until we're bored of it. Please read The Blind Watchmaker before you suggest again that it's "one of the single biggest problems with evolutionary theory".
As for ID-- it seems to me that the science has become more dogmatic, intellectually dishonest, and hypocritical than the Catholic church ever dreamt of. They have become greater than their successor in they very ways that they so stood against
Hmm, I *think* I've managed to extract what you meant to write from what you did write. But you're going to have to cite some examples of this dogmatism, hypicrisy and intellectual dishonesty to convince me. Making sure the culprit is representative of "science", though, and not some arbitrary zealot.
Contradicting me with a statement of the bloody obvious in the form of a load of waffle about "proto this" and "intermediate that" only makes sense if they thought I did say that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do you think so?
I suppose it had fins and gills, but ran around on land on the nails of extended fingers and made a "neighhhhh" sound.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
the other posters may have pointed this out already, but for sake of completeness:
Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
Agreed that would be ridiculous. However your understanding is incorrect.
They're only considered seperate species when they can't reproduce succesfully. Succes is defined as producing children that can reproduce.
The canonical example is the horse and the donkey. They can breed succesfully, producing a mule. A mule however is sterile. By definition horses and donkeys are considered seperate species. The example you give with fish has been observed in the wild (with Cichlids in Lake Victoria).
If you are genuinely interested in this matter, you would enjoy reading Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. He makes a very clear case in that book for how complex life can have evolved from simple reproducing agents (proteins).
I fully agree with your criticism that aliens (were they to exist) must have come from somewhere as well. That argument applies to God as well of course. Clearly God must have originated somewhere. If you are to believe that God just came to be, then you might as well believe that life just came to be. According to Occam's razor the God concept would just be an unnecessary idea. Like one of them famous people once said about God: "I have no need for that hypothesis"
It's outside of our scope of experience, various cultures will have various stories that are unique to them. People get so uppity when you call their religion a myth yet seem not to have many problems when you do it for others...strange.
When I use the word Myth, I'm use it in the same way that Joseph Campbell uses the word.
Evolution is not a myth. Evolution is a theory.
Theory's explain the observable world. Myths explain more, but only as a "form of truth" not the ultimate truth.
Point taken, I was using a broad brush but Christianity most certainly is under the umbrella of myth. I do not view the Bible as a historically valid and cogent source of material. It's, as you said, a collection of myths, story retelling (oh wait, those fall under the category of myth as well), other historical accounts (oh wait, that too falls under the umbrella of myth), census results (wtf? ok) and "books of poetry" which also would be under myth. The bibles historical accounts have no validity for telling us true history. It can be a pointer to events that occurred but it is not the event as it happened historically.
If you disagree, explain to me why each Gospel portrays a different Jesus? Different writers, with different messages about the Life of Christ and as such, the mythologization process begins! Thanks for coming out.
Please, go read Joseph Campbell. I am not painting Christianity with a derogatory brush, yet Christians tend to get quite uppity on this issue.
If you recant on your deathbed, that's setting sin=false, just in the nick of time.
So why follow a religion?
There's cake?
(Not an entirely flippant answer - I'm beginning to get the impression that the majority of normal church/chapel goers aren't fully convinced about the paranormal stuff, but go along for social reasons.)
This is a little out of order, but...
They are generally more concerned with things like the origins of new organs and systems, or the transformation of one type of organ into an entirely different type of organ.
That is an interesting point. I am surprised to hear it, because it does not deny the possibility of man evolving from primates or other animals, but merely asks how did the heart evolve or how did mammals evolve from fish.
When people make a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, they generally are not talking about the minutia of what might constitute a new species.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Granted, they often seem to argue as if species is a huge chasm that can never be jumped, or they claim that evolutionists believe that cats give birth to dogs, or some other ridiculous mischaracterization. I think many ID proponents are trying to argue that man could not have evolved naturally from anything else.
To me, the current explanations available for these types of changes..., ring hollow to the point of seeming almost ridiculous.
Not being a biologist myself, I can't answer that question. I know that Darwin had answered a similar question regarding the evolution of the eye. As for the notion that other explanations ring hollow, they are still possible, and the most plausible explanations available.
As for God, He gets full credit for macroevolution and microevolution alike, so I don't see where He need come in to the question.
If that is your personal belief, then I would say that I disagree, and leave it at that. I just hope that you're not promoting that opinion as a scientific theory.
I think you misunderstood me here. I meant the further we go on the further we realise there are... "cosmic balances" out there.
No, there really aren't. What gives you this silly idea, other than your own wishful thinking? Do you have evidence for these "balances" you claim exist?
Things happen for a reason.
They sure do! Quantum mechanics, relativity, and so forth, are the reason things happen the way they do.
'course, I suspect you're actually appealing to hollow, new-age mysticism, in which case the actual response is, no... things really don't happen for a reason. There is no magic, cosmic intelligence guiding the universe. If there were, we'd find evidence for it, and we don't (unless, of course, you're withholding what would be the greatest discovery in the history of man).
you're fairly angry and hateful when it comes to things like this.
Only because you see it that way. I see it as an attempt to push back the tide of ignorance that's attempting to drown us all. It's these kinds of silly beliefs that cause people to buy magic holy water from Russia, or withhold medical care from their loved one because they believe laying on hands will cure their disease.
I love how we have no explanation for the creation of the universe other than either: ...
And yet you quickly jump to discredit anything but your own theory.
Ah, but, you see, here's the difference: my theory is actually a theory. It was formed based on evidence gathered by the tireless efforts of countless astronomers, physicists, and other scientists. And in all that time, never once has evidence appeared to support your "cosmic magic" theory.
And yet you wonder why I jump to discredit other theories? Gee, how 'bout because they aren't theories.
That is not science; you've entered politics.
Quite the contrary. It's precisely science. See, here's how science works:
1) Propose theory.
2) Using theory, make prediction.
3) Based on prediction, conduct experiment to test prediction.
4) Validate or invalidate prediction.
5) If prediction holds true, go to step 2.
6) If prediction does not hold true, throw away theory or otherwise refine it, and return to step 1.
Interestingly enough, no religion has ever gone through these steps. So of course it should be discredited.
By accepting that there is no random, that things happen for a reason (pressures of whatever sort)... Then you are effectively agreeing with me.
I'm sorry, when did I say that? Hell, I said the precise opposite... did you already forget step one in my little primer on natural selection? You know, the random mutation bit?
Besides, your "things happen for a reason" line is based on the idea that a conscious intelligence of some form is "guiding" things. I have never, ever claimed that to be the case. Your attempt to paint my position as such is either a gross misunderstanding of my postings, or a lame attempt to blur the line between science and religion. The former is simply ignorance, and I can accept that. The latter is far more insidious, and is a common tactic used by the religious right to force religion into schools.
but rather that there is some form of "intelligence" (likely the fish itself) pushing it to grow wings.
Phew, so you are just grossly ignorant.
If I jump out a window, is there some "intelligence" causing me to fall to the ground? No. It's simple physics. Evolution is no different.
(I am a skeptic, of everything, and always will be.)
No, you're not. If you were, you wouldn't be spouting new-age "everything happens for a reason" rhetoric.
A true skeptic uses their senses and their mind to evaluate theories based on evidence. I have yet to see you do that. Instead, you would rather live in a world where some magical thing is out there "guiding" things... that's your choice, but it ain't science, and it sure ain't evidence of healthy skepticism.
The Bible provides direct testimony from the creator Himself, whereas all of evolution's so called evidence is at best inferred and circumstantial. The question you, as part of the jury must decide is whether to BELIEVE the witness or some circumstantial evidence gathered after the fact. In the end, it all comes down to belief.
You seem to have overlooked one tiny flaw. God isn't standing in the courtroom (or lecture theater) giving testimony. Nor do we have his literal, verifiable signature at the bottom of Genisis. Calling the Bible direct testimony is a bit of an over-statement. It's more like a written statement where the witness had died and there's no video (or even direct, reliable witnesses) of the statement being written.
Although it might be presented at evidence, this is hardly going to carry the sort of weight you describe.
I'm not calling him names because I disagree with him. I'm calling him names because he's misrepresenting science in a disgusting way. He's also spreading misinformation about Dawkins. Whether he is lying or merely ignorant, he's still evil and stupid. Refusing to educate oneself is evil and stupid.
Clever signature text goes here.
I'm not sure (a) where you get that average from, or (b) why you think it is relevant. Even if catastrophic asteroid collisions each (or at least, the most recent one, which is the only one that matters) reset life on Earth to the beginning, or at least eliminated everything with even the most primitive brain, you would use the most recent catastrophic collision, not the average. In fact, fairly complex creatures -- with, on the grand scale, fairly well-developed brains -- survived the most recent asteroid collision, so its completely irrelevant.
The reason evolution is characterized as "survival of the fittest" is that if a mutation has a benefit in fitness, it will come to predominate. A "benefit in fitness" is, after all, defined by increasing the number of offspring that survive to reproduce.
What if it is? Heritable traits with a fitness advantage will still spread if they arise.
"Beneficial mutations" are those with produce a fitness benefit. Fitness is defined by offspring surviving to reproduce. The definition of which mutations are "beneficial" is not consistent with them simply dying out the way you describe.
They start out as single signaling systems that aren't at all brain like, just useful in simple stimulus and response. They develop into decentralized nervous systems still without processing nodes like those in certain invertebrates today (e.g., jellyfish). You eventually, in animals where this is beneficial, get simple processing nodes -- ganglia. Over many, many generations, one of these ganglia gets more developed and you've got something worth calling a brain.
Wrong. The ability to respond to stimulus is (or at least, can be in the right circumstances) a fitness advantage. Even incrementally refined ability also can be. You don't need to go from no nervous system to advanced brain to get an advantage.
What 'chicken and egg' problem? You've articulated no actual problem that meets that description that actually applies here.
Do you see everything around you, including yourself, your own existence as allegorical and poetic?
No. But I do take religion as being allegorical and poetic - human truths rather than physical ones.
Since no scientists was around to observe the creation event and the events immediately thereafter, we have to BELIEVE the evidence still available from the distant past.
No, we don't - lots of "ancient wisdom" turns out to be "ancient BS". And even if we were to believe that evidence, we would still have to pick and choose which story to believe - not all creation myth is based on the Bible.
Witnesses are generally assumed to be truthful, unless it can be unambiguously shown that a witness is lying or untrustworthy. ...
Or conflicting (2 creation stories), or just crazy (Revelations), or
If I took the witness stand would you believe it if I told you that there were fairies living in my garden? How is that different?
Witness testimony is, more often than not, the deciding factor in the outcome of a court case, circumstantial evidence notwithstanding.
Which sucks, because eyewitness accounts tend to be extremely unreliable compared to physical evidence.
The Bible provides direct testimony from the creator Himself, whereas all of evolution's so called evidence is at best inferred and circumstantial.
It's certainly not direct - first it went through multiple retellings and translations.
The question you, as part of the jury must decide is whether to BELIEVE the witness or some circumstantial evidence gathered after the fact.
I'll believe DNA, fossils, and rocks over the guy who rambles about the proper treatment of slaves, burning bushes that talk, and how he created people out of mud.
Hey, I can tell you haven't read any science papers! Look at most papers and they end in, "As I have shown this field is ripe for research, unfortunately we still do not know X, Y or Z.
PS. Please renew my grant."
Ever heard, "The more you know, the more you realise you don't know"?
The most dangerous drug
Yes, but what you fail to understand is-- panspermia or no panspermia, ID is a valid theory.
ID, with a little reworking, could be a valid hypothesis. A hypothesis is just an idea, a theory has to have evidence.
There were no edits--he implicitly admitted the scientific status of the theory of ID by referring to one potential conclusion that you may arrive at by it being proved (namely--panspermia).
He threw out a wild scenario in which ID could become an actual theory. But you missed the point of his talk - even if ID turned out to be true for life on Earth, the original complexity would have to develop somewhere else through a process like evolution. The only way to have intelligence without evolution (or a similar process), is magic - and that can't be part of a scientific theory.
Take a scenario where we know ID happened - genetically modified organisms. People have deliberately inserted genes into plants and animals, making that feature designed intelligently. But you still evolution to create the original complexity (the people) that makes them intelligent, so that they can design. And that was Dawkin's point - the order of "first life, then intelligence, last design" is the only way to rework ID so that it fits into a scientific framework.
That, in my view, is but one of the inevitable many victories in store for ID theorists.
Well if you lower the bar to "caught one person speculating in a way we can misinterpret as supporting us", then I suppose.
Thank you for explaining the current political process to me.
I believe that you are right, we should start voting the thieves out of office, but we need to STOP replacing them with other thieves. Then maybe the politicians would start breeding smarter ... Alternatively instead of voting them out of office we must start hunting them.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
You seem to be giving the 'half an eye is no use' argument an airing, except with brains, or some other feature - and you treat it as a dirty little secret the 'evolutionists' brush under the carpet. *That's* intellectual dishonesty. The question has been answered over and over again, until we're bored of it. Please read The Blind Watchmaker before you suggest again that it's "one of the single biggest problems with evolutionary theory".
Yes, that's exactly the argument. And, though I've not read the entire book, I'm familiar with its arguments. Although it offers imaginative theories for what might have happened, there's two problems with them. One-- there's **WAY** less detail than should be required by true scientific scrutiny. Two-- they're just imaginations about what *might* have happened. I'm sorry, but that is not hard science.
Hmm, I *think* I've managed to extract what you meant to write from what you did write. But you're going to have to cite some examples of this dogmatism, hypicrisy and intellectual dishonesty to convince me. Making sure the culprit is representative of "science", though, and not some arbitrary zealot.
Well, my response to the blind watchmaker is the perfect example. Evolutionists are far too quick to pat themselves on the back when they really have not offered sufficiently detailed explanations. And, the popular scientists which you see indoctrinating children on such TV stations as Discovery fail to admit (and in fact most often suppress or gloss over) what they do not know and all too often present their 'theories' (and imaginations) as absolute fact. That's dishonest enough for me (especially when you see the effects it has on society).
At this point, you may say that 'scientists' are not responsible for what happens in the popular media. But, there's a problem with that-- the same well-respected (and highly qualified) scientists appear in the popular media making outrageous claims and yet, the scientific community does not reprimand or denounce their activities. Silent approval is approval nonetheless.
Two problems with that-- 1) 100 million years (the average time between catastrophic asteroid collisions with earth) is not nearly enough time to produce the current scenario. I'm not sure (a) where you get that average from, or (b) why you think it is relevant. Even if catastrophic asteroid collisions each (or at least, the most recent one, which is the only one that matters) reset life on Earth to the beginning, or at least eliminated everything with even the most primitive brain, you would use the most recent catastrophic collision, not the average. In fact, fairly complex creatures -- with, on the grand scale, fairly well-developed brains -- survived the most recent asteroid collision, so its completely irrelevant.
Ok, so now you can tell me exactly when the last life-resetting asteroid collision occurred? The reverse prophetic powers of you evolutionists never ceases to amaze me! I used the average because it is the only number we have. Even if you adjust the number by 3 standard deviations (to cover 99.7% of the possibilities), it will be quite a small number in cosmological terms.
"Beneficial mutations" are those with produce a fitness benefit. Fitness is defined by offspring surviving to reproduce. The definition of which mutations are "beneficial" is not consistent with them simply dying out the way you describe.
So, it's only 'by definition' that you can explain this? What about actual empirical evidence? You can define things all day long to be whatever you want, but if your definitions do not actually explain (or represent) what happens in nature, they're worthless (at least for this pursuit).
What 'chicken and egg' problem? You've articulated no actual problem that meets that description that actually applies here.
The 'chicken and egg' problem is this-- natural selection cannot be the raison d'Ãtre for the original self-replicating cell (and if you can accept it larger subsystems such as brains). You must have self-replication before you can have genetic transference and 'change over time'. Admittedly, this is easier to see when looking at a single cell and not larger sub-systems.
Do you realize how complex self-replication is? John von Neumann built what he believed was the simplest self-replicating cellular automaton in the completely artificial [i.e., 'pure'] environment of mathematics and yet, it contained hundreds of moving parts. If you were to do such within the laws of chemistry and physics, needless to say, there'd be orders of magnitude more moving parts!
Never. Major asteroid collisions or other environmental catastrophes may lead to mass extinctions, they don't (that is, none that have occurred have) reset life on Earth to square one.
Uh, wrong. Any average we have is probably the result of taking a series of actual intervals between particular events and averaging them. The most recent mass extinction event, the K-T event, was approximately 65.5 million years ago. (And "reverse prophetic powers" -- the power to "predict" the past -- aren't all that amazing.)
It is important to understand the definitions of words to communicate. A "beneficial" mutation is one that has a very particular kind of impact -- that is, it increases biological fitness.
What about it? There is considerable empirical evidence that changes within species result from the spread of particular traits which impact the mean number of offspring an organism will have that survive to reproduce.
This isn't a "chicken and egg" problem. Evolution doesn't claim to be an explanation of the origins of the first life, its an explanation of the development of the diversity of life from its origins. There are, of course, theories which cover the origin of life, and they are consistent with evolution and invoke some of the same lower-level mechanism that are involved in understanding evolution, but they have a different subject matter.
(The 'half an eye' argument)
Yes, that's exactly the argument.
[...]
there's **WAY** less detail than should be required by true scientific scrutiny
[...]
Evolutionists are far too quick to pat themselves on the back when they really have not offered sufficiently detailed explanations.
The 'sufficiently detailed explanations' you seek are not typically in popular science books or magazines. They are too technical and detailed for that audience. Here is a fascinating piece about the development of eyes which is more in-depth than usual for a pop-sci article. If that's not enough detail for you, you can pursue the papers it references.
The hard science is there. You're just not looking for it. Or you're choosing to ignore it.
Now, I haven't found an equivalent article on brains for you - but TFA demonstrates that researchers, far from 'patting themselves on the back' are looking at it in depth. You'll find papers if you look. You might need to study some undergraduate genetics textbooks first in order to understand them, mind you! And if you didn't manage to read the whole of The Blind Watchmaker... (I fail to see how you could be 'familiar with its arguments' without reading it. It doesn't waste words.)
If there really were any features that could not have arisen through natural selection, it would be big news. Exciting news. The science press would be all over it.
Think of all the cool organisms that might exist if we weren't constrained by this need for features to develop gradually. For example, why are there no animals with wheels?
And, I think it's safe to say that amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and many plants would be wiped out by a catastrophic asteroid.
No, it's not. I don't know why you think that every species of land animal would be wiped out by every major impact. Even your link points out that the last major impact only "eradicates about half of all animal species".
Doncha know, 1 in a billion odds happen 9 times in 10.
If subsets of a species no longer interbreed then surely that itself is the moment of speciation... no? They would still be very similar initially, but once they're in 2 distinct groups that don't interbreed variation between them would likely only increase. I hadn't heard of ring species before... that one is a line blurrer, I'll grant you. I suppose you could denote all 3 as subspecies, but then the distinctness of A and C makes that inaccurate. Maybe classify B as a hybrid, but that wouldn't be true either... ok, yeah. That one's difficult.
....Actually the Drake equation has held for some time...
Just because someone comes with an equation does not at all mean that such an equation reflects reality.
The factor R, listed first has absolutely no bearing at all since a star may not have any planets at all. Giving the number two for a factor Ne is so ridiculous to be laughable. Half of all existing stars in all galaxies are too close to each other in order to have *any* planet that could have a stable orbit needed for a temperature range to allow liquid water. No liquid water, -- no life. If two or more stars are closer than about 3.8 ly to each other, none of such stars can ever have a habitable zone for any planet. The nearest star to the sun is Alpha Centauri, about 4.2 ly distant. There is a distinct habitable zone for a planet around only ONE star and there is also a distinct habitable zone for a star/planet system in a galaxy.
The chemical makeup parameters of a planet to support intelligent life is also rather narrow. There has to be a moon that is large is relation to the planet. This keeps the axis of the planet steady. A suitable magnetic field is also needed to shield complex life forms from damaging radiation. Of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, only a very tiny fraction is useful to support life. It "happens" to be the part of the spectrum that is visible and is also finely matched to the energy requirements of photosynthesis. It also just "so happens" that the spectral output of the sun is centered on the visible part of the spectrum. If you would do the multiplicative mathematics for the factor of Ne all by itself, it would come up to be a number in the order of one in 10^-15.
There are also a number of other requirements in the laws of physics that you can search out on your own. The relationships among the four forces that govern all matter and energy are precisely what is needed in order for life to form anywhere at all in the entire universe. Many scientists have realized this and try to get around it by postulating the existence of many universes. That is a fine fairy tale but it is not science. Only the universe we are in is accessible to scientific investigation.
Even if only a conservative one in 50 probability is assigned to each of the parameters needed to have a universe with a habitable planet, the probability of all of these coming together by any known statistical process is so tiny, that it may be confidently set to zero. There is no way of getting around the mathematics of probability that inform us that a universe containing place like our earth is exceedingly rare. It behooves us therefore to take good care of it, because it is not likely that we will find another place to live anytime soon.
All theory is gray
So what you are saying is, it is impossible for 'GOD' to create a universe that functions like this, well it would seem, that in your opinion, that the supreme being of the universe has clear Christian defined limitations upon it's skills, abilities and knowledge and ain't all that supreme after all.
Technically speaking by your own beliefs, either the supreme being can create any kind of universe including an evolutionary living universe or they lack the intellectual capability to do so and would appear to be limited in their abilities based upon the intelligence and imagination of those who claim to speak upon the supreme being's behalf.
Hmm, so if a preacher can't understand it, 'GOD' cant create it, interesting, now doesn't that really define religions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
...I'll believe DNA, fossils, and rocks....
So do I, but we differ on how we believe these got here. Fairies and magic don't have anywhere near a power that evolutionists ascribe to time and chance. In children's stories, a beautiful maiden's magic kiss can turn a frog into a prince. In adults children's stories, called evolution, the much more powerful magic of lots of time combined with chance can turn even a rock into a prince.
Children's stories often begin with "Once upon a time...." The evolutionary tale is similar. You can find the intoning magic words: "Billions of years ago...." in big thick books with lots of fanciful, beautifully done illustrations. It is amazing how often the word "assume" is found in these authoritative appearing tomes. "Assume" is a more educated way of saying "believe", but when you assume something, you don't know it, but are guessing.
Somewhere near the beginning of such books you can read: Billions of years ago, ceaseless torrents of rain washed minerals from the rocky (minerals come from rocks) land and other compounds formed by the aid of innumerable lightening bolts into the pre-biotic soup of the warm seas. There these compounds, bumping into each other, by chance over time, made larger molecules called amino acids. These are the basic building blocks of all life, sort of like the bricks of a house.
After more time, (magic) these amino acids and other components organized themselves into single celled organisms, such as simple bacteria. (actually, bacteria are anything but simple) Some of them called algae, in time evolved to use sunlight to get energy. Green algae are part of the plant kingdom. In the course of millions of years, algae turned into roses, sunflowers and 300 foot tall redwood trees as well as all other plants we have today.
In further chapters of such textbooks we read: Some sea dwellers, after several million years, got bored with the ocean and were able to also live on land. When the tide went out, some of them were left stuck on the beach. Somehow, maybe by trial and error (chance) some did not dry out, but figured out how to breathe air for a while. Creatures that can live both in the water and on land are called amphibians. This is where the frogs come into the story.
In subsequent chapters such textbooks continue with the evolutionary narrative with: After more time, some of these left the water and evolved to live entirely on land. They found they could also make a good living there, eating plants and each other. After a lot more time some even figured out how to fly. Such fliers had first been insects or reptiles, some of which could fly, but then after more time, evolved into birds, which are much better fliers, partly because they somehow learned how to regulate their body temperatures independently of their environment. In their bird brains they also figured out how to construct strong yet light hollow bones and invent feathers. Have you ever looked at a feather under a microscope? Feathers are complicated and beautiful.
Still further inside these beautifully illustrated so-called science books the story continues with: In time, (more magic) some evolved to bear their young alive, rather than laying eggs. These are called mammals such as elephants, dogs, cats and bats. In time, some of the four legged mammals practiced walking on their hind legs, became good at it and soon made a habit walking upright. These are the monkeys and apes. They could use what used to be front legs and feet as arms with hands on them for grabbing and hugging. They learned how to modify two of their fingers into thumbs. Some of them use their tails for these activities also.
In the final chapters of such textbooks they get around to this: Eventually, after more, still much more time, one of these apes developed a bigger brain, lost most body hair and the tail and thus at last became human. Humans are the result of the most powerful magic time is capable of. That big brain gave humans a huge advantage over any other animal.
All theory is gray
Only if one of the axioms in your system of reasoning is: 'God [or a supernatural creator] does not exist'.
Which is why I included the "magic" exception.
I'm not suggesting that we instead replace that axiom with its negation (although in my personal system of reasoning, it is so).
And that's where I loose you guys. Sorry.
I am simply suggesting that scientists simply be honest that they start with such materialist assumptions and that those assumptions do, whether they realize it or not, affect their ultimate interpretations of the data and their conclusions.
I don't know of any good "intro to science" book that doesn't discuss the philosophical foundations and limitations of science. I think that this might help.
You may claim that systems of reasoning are not completely scientific, but philosophy has value too (especially when truly seeking truth).
Well, both science and philosophy are both valuable, but they are different things. If you want mere guesses about Absolute Truth stick with philosophy or religion, if you want carefully reasoned conclusions based only on what you can observe then go with science.
...God isn't standing in the courtroom (or lecture theater) giving testimony...
I guess you have never heard of a deposition, a written document of one or more witnesses. How do historians verify the accuracy and truthfulness of ancient works such as by Homer and Aristotle? How do we know that even more recent works, such as Shakespeare for example, are preserved in an authentic manner? Do we have a video or a direct evidence of reliable witnesses that can authenticate the musical works of Mozart or Beethoven? Are the writings of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin really authored by men of those names? We don't have a video of George Washington or any of the men who signed the Constitution. How do we know that the piece of paper enshrined in the national archives is not an elaborate fake?
I find it incongruous that you, a /.er would even name a video as a means of authentication for anything. I am almost positive that you know for a fact that any electronic information is more easily falsified in an untraceable way, than any record any human being might have been capable of making before electronic records were invented.
It seems strange to me that people are willing to readily believe documents from history that don't even have a small fraction of the number of ancient manuscripts still available, than the thousands of independently written and compiled documents available for the Bible.
(..Calling the Bible direct testimony is a bit of an over-statement...)
Based on historical and legal methodologies, it is possible to establish the correctness of the biblical record far more certainly than any other written document older than a few human lifetimes. The science of archaeology also has never refuted so much as a single biblical reference to events and places in the ancient lands where the Chronicles of the Bible were written and take place.
I have just finished reading the New York Times bestseller titled "The Case For Christ". In it, the author brings up almost all of the common charges of inaccuracies and far-fetched stories contained in, in this case, the New Testament and the life of Jesus Christ as chronicled therein. If you are brave enough to get it and read it, your view of the Bible and the Christian message therein could change your mind and indeed your whole life.
All theory is gray
I'm sorry, but it's quite clear you do not understand science. To claim that ID and evolution have equivalent amounts of proof supporting them is just nonsensical.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I'm not really sure how to respond to your rambling summary of the history of life on Earth. Most of the steps you describe are very well-supported by the fossil record, and the more recent ones are supported by several other lines of evidence (DNA comparison, etc). From what you've written, I don't think you really understand what the theory of biological evolution actually is, or why scientists feel that the evidence in favor of it is overwhelming.
In their bird brains they also figured out how to construct strong yet light hollow bones and invent feathers.
They didn't "figure out" anything, some animals are born with genes a little different than their parents' genes, and some managed to have more descendants than others, that's all.
In this modern tale, the magic ingredient necessary to turn a rock into a prince, is time, unimaginable amounts of time operating in partnership with the lesser magic of chance.
And selection - that's an important part. And don't knock time - by choosing which wolves to mate we've managed to created teacup poodles, bulldogs and Saint Bernards in a fairly short time - don't you think similar things happen in the wild?
It is such a shame that they call this fairy story factual and label it science. They give it an important sounding name, "The Theory of Evolution".
It's the scientific theory about why biological organisms have evolved, and that that process explains the diversity of life we see around us.
This fiction, called evolution, is taught in public schools as truth and is financed by your tax dollars.
It's the theory that ties biology together into a cohesive subject. Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching physics without forces, chemistry without particles, or psychology without the subconscious - it would make education in that subject pointless.
Well, whatever the amount is, it isn't the sort of number that you can be certain of to very many significant digits is it?
That was my point - it certainly isn't "safe" to assume that every asteroid impact hits the reset button on evolution.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
I think you're not qualified to decide who get to call themselves Christians. After all, that's one of the few things where the truth really is decided on popular vote... Only the worst fundamentalist christians believes that all the christians that believe differently from them are not Real Christians(tm).
I've seriously never understood the classical religious position on this stuff. I don't believe it would take a God to steer evolution; based on all available evidence, it would take a God to stop it.
My view is that it's caused by what I call a "small view of God". They don't see God as creator of the entire universe with all its laws and mechanisms (including evolution), they see God as a powerful being within this universe (like superman) that created only this earth and everything on it, but not the rest of the universe.
Personally, I see God as creator of the entire universe and everything in it, and that includes evolution. Like you, I don't understand religious people who are troubled by evolution. They're not just denying science, IMO they're denying the greatness of God.
The only places in the United states, that are worth living in, are on the East and West coasts. :)
Austin is rumoured to be pretty cool too. And that's Texas!
Christians do not deny MICRO-evolution. For example, when two different breeds of dog mate, they form something different.
However, we deny that species evolve into other species.
Who is this "we" you speak of? Quite a lot of christians have no problem whatsoever with evolution, natural selection, speciation, or any other aspect of mondern biology.
If you think the Bible is just poetry (which it is, at best) you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
Who made you the guardian of the word "christian", that you can decide which christians can and can't call themselves christian?
Why you've been modded insightful is a mystery to me. You seem to think the bible only consists of Genesis 1 (and possibly 2), which are the creation stories in the bible, and only a very small part of it.
Genesis 1, the first (and most recent) creation story is quite obviously poetry. I don't see how anyone, not even a self-proclaimed-judge-on-who's-christian-and-who's-not, can not see that. Genesis 2, is a different and much older creation story, is prose, but still most likely allegorical.
The parent post didn't say he/she thought the whole Bible was just allegorical or poetic; just the creation story as found in Genesis. There are plenty of us Christians who believe that the creation story told in Genesis is simply a simplistic retelling of what happened. For example, the 6 days (+1 of rest) are not actually 24 hours or 1000 years are anything like that - they simply represent periods of time, which could have been millions or billions of years.
And even that should probably not be taken too literally. The big difference between the oldest creation story (Genesis 2) and the more recent one (Genesis 1), is that in Genesis 2, God creates man, plants and animals, whereas in Genesis 1, he creates light, darkness, the stars, time, etc. Basically the entire universe with all its laws of physics. Genesis 1 presents a much greater image of God than the much older story in Genesis 2.
To me, that is the big message of Genesis 1: God isn't just some superman that's a product of our own universe, he created the entire universe with all its laws, machanisms and constants (which are inextricably part of it, if Einstein is to be believed).
In any case, you can accept parts of the Bible as allegorical or poetical (although I'd argue that those are very few)
I'd disagree with you. Poetry is a large part of the bible: Job, Psalms, Song of Songs, and many, many smaller parts in various bible books. The bible opening with a poem (most likely written during the Babylonian exile, by the way) isn't really all that surprising.
By the way, a peom isn't automatically true or false. It's poetic. There's layers of hidden meaning and beauty in it. But that idea is probably more suited to art students than to nerds who tend to think in true-or-false logic. (No offense, I'm just like that myself.)
Where is this stated? Where in the Bible is this alternate time length mentioned?
2 Peter 3:8
Why, precisely, are you bending what was written to justify your belief?
Why are you bending what was written to justify your unbelief?
If ever there was a post that needed to be modded informative, it's this one.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to side with the bible basher on this one. I'm pretty sure if you're to claim you're a Christian, you need to believe at least:
Not necessarily. The bible certainly isn't all that explicit about this. That lake of fire is only mentioned in Revelations, and various areas of the bible mention eternal death or outer darkness or something like that, but how exactly to interpret that is not trivial. I think the bible is more explicit about a new Earth.
I don't think there's any getting around this one. I don't see how anyone can be a Christian without believing in God.
The name of your boolean is poorly chosen, because most chriatians believe it's impossible not so sin. Those who believe in Jesus sin just as much as anyone else. It's 'forgiven' that needs to be true too in order to compensate.
Now, I was brought up in a Welsh Presbyterian tradition (which doesn't the fundamentalist connotations it may have in the US) and like you, despite not believing in the mumbo jumbo aspects, I hold 'Christian values' dear - love thy neighbour, turn the other cheek, all that good stuff. I have a star atop my Christmas tree. But I'm still an atheist.
Christmas trees go well with being an atheist. It's a pagan tradition and has nothing to do with christianity. I know a lot of christians who don't have a christmas tree, and I'm one of them (although mostly because of the mess they cause).
O.K. so they are saying that my great great great... grandfather was a fish? It would probably sound more realistic if the obstacles or other elements that caused the fish to give birth to a closer to human fish were discussed. This always confuses me.
...And selection - that's an important part.....
based on what? How does a reptile develop GRADUALLY over millions of years develop feathers? Where does it get the additional genetic information to construct feathers? Feathers are VERY complex. Like I wrote, have YOU ever looked at a feather under a microscope? How does selection work to gradually, over a many generations prod a reptile to make feathers? Incomplete, nonfunctional feathers or other structures are useless for survival and are therefore not passed on to succeeding generations. Unless a feature confers a distinct advantage on an organism, it is invisible to the natural selection mechanism.
(... by choosing which wolves to mate we've managed to created teacup poodles, bulldogs and Saint Bernards in a fairly short time - don't you think similar things happen in the wild?...)
The fact is that none of these things happen in the wild, because the selective breeding of dogs is accomplished by means of the application of human intelligence. In other words there is intelligent design to produce a desired result.
(...It's the scientific theory about why biological organisms have evolved,...)
No, it is a fiction that has to be believed in the same way that various religions are believed. It is a tale that substitutes huge amounts of time, probability and a nebulous thing called selection in place of the application of intelligence to account for the incredible complexity and diversity of living things, including ourselves. There is no human effort to does not involve a measure of intelligence. Why is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans credit the existence of even the existence of a single living cell to processes NOT ALSO involving intelligence and thought?
(...Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching ....)
students the truth by not telling them the fiction that biological structures and systems, far more complex devices and functions than anything people have ever done by intelligent design, came about by random probabilistic means over immense periods of time. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to tie theories of origins to the present day workings of all systems, including biological ones. That sort of teaching belongs in history and philosophy classes. Science is not about what was thought to have taken place an unimaginably long time ago.
All theory is gray
Do you have an idea what the probability is that a fish can evolve into a horse? I'll give you a hint. Your probability of winning next 23 consecutive lotteries is significantly higher than that a fish will evolve into a horse.
Ah! Thank you!
hat is an excellent example for explaining just how statistically certain evolution is.
You see, there's not just one person buying lottery tickets.
If you stand in the front entrance of the lottery office, a lottery winner will walk in the door essentially every week. Not just 23 weeks in a row, but essentially every week of every year for four billion years.
That's how evolution works. Millions and billions of new lottery tickets each week, and the evolution lottery office collects up all of those winners and passes them on to the next generation, for new lottery winners to pile up on top of them. Evolution is a pile of winning lottery tickets 200-billion-weekly-tickets tall.
Actually evolution is even more powerful and even more certain than that, but there isn't really any need to go into genetic recombination here (taking half of one losing lottery ticket and pasting it onto half of another losing lottery ticket to MANUFACTURE a new winning lottery ticket). The basic validity of evolution is demonstrated by your own example as-is. The CERTAINTY of "23 consecutive lotter[y]" wins and more shows just how easy evolution is.
And not to mention the physical evidence which absolutely proves evolution as historical fact, such as the absolutely continuous complete fossil record tracing diverse modern species of Foraminifera back to their common ancestor tens of millions of years ago.
Scientifically the argument over evolution is over. All that is left are public relations disinformation campaigns against evolution, political battles over the issue, and ignorant misinformed ideological opposition to evolution.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Where does it get the additional genetic information to construct feathers?
From the environment. To anthropomorphize a bit: every living thing is a question ("How well does this set of genes work in this environment?"), and their reproductive success is the answer. As different "questions" are "answered", the amount of information that can be incorporated in organisms' genes increases.
Unless a feature confers a distinct advantage on an organism, it is invisible to the natural selection mechanism.
That's true., but...
Incomplete, nonfunctional feathers or other structures are useless for survival and are therefore not passed on to succeeding generations.
...this isn't. There are many ways that feather-like scales could be useful to an organism that have nothing to do with flight - keeping warm, for instance.
The fact is that none of these things happen in the wild, because the selective breeding of dogs is accomplished by means of the application of human intelligence.
It doesn't matter if it's a person picking the whitest rabbits to breed and selling the rest, or hawks picking off the ones that are easier to spot in the snow - the effect is the same. Sorry, but I don't even know where to begin with this example of willful ignorance - if I rolled a rock down a hill to crate a rockslide, would you then insist that rockslides can't happen in the wild and requires human intelligence?
Why is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans credit the existence of even the existence of a single living cell to processes NOT ALSO involving intelligence and thought?
Because we have another explanation that fits the evidence better and requires fewer assumptions.
Science is not about what was thought to have taken place an unimaginably long time ago.
So most of geology and astronomy aren't really science?
Science has no axiom either way on the existence or non-existence of God.
Anyone utilizing either one in their reasoning is going to produce scientifically invalid junk.
I would like to propose a particular axiom however. One that I do personally apply. That axiom is:
We are not being deliberately deceived by any God or being with God-like powers.
Why do I accept and apply that axiom? Because if it is false then we may as well be in the Matrix, nothing we see can be trusted, nothing we sense can be trusted, nothing we know can be trusted, noting we remember can be trusted. Everything around us could be deception, our very memories can be fraudulent. Any thought and any communication becomes pointless without that axiom.
So I assert that axiom is implicit in any communication. I decline to waste my time attempting to communicate with anyone who is unwilling to accept that as an axiom.
). I am simply suggesting that scientists simply be honest that they start with such materialist assumptions and that those assumptions do, whether they realize it or not, affect their ultimate interpretations of the data and their conclusions.
Based on that first axiom and all of my senses and memories, I assert there is a material world.
Based on that first axiom and all of my senses and memories and understanding, I assert that material world operates according to various natural laws and natural mechanisms.
There may or may not be a God, but if there is a God that God created that natural world and those he created that material world and those natural mechanisms. And by the first axiom, that natural world and the evidence it provides s and those natural laws and those natural mechanisms, they are not crafted to be deliberately deceptive.
If you dig in the arctic or antarctic ice, you will see that it contains yearly layers. During the summer a thin layer of dust and pollen blown in from across the globe settle on the surface, and that surface bakes under the sun for 6 months visibly changing it's texture. During the winter another layer of snow is laid down. You can did and count down layers and find traces of volcanic ash blown in from every major eruption in history. If you dig down 1929 layers you can find traces of ash from the famous 79 A.D. eruption that destroyed Pompeii. Each layer equals one year.
If you keep digging, there are approximately one hundred thousand visible countable layers (actually there's about 800,000 years worth by the time you get to the bottom, but the layers get squeezed to thin to be individually detectable). Each layer has a trace of dust and pollen, and at irregular intervals you can find trace ash from a hundred thousand years of prehistoric volcanoes.
By any rational standard, God or no God, the earth must be at minimum 100,000 years old. Anyone who claims the earth is ~6,000 years old is just plain wrong. That right there invalidates a large percentage of the people denying evolution.
At this point I would like to split evolution into two areas. The validity of evolution as a description of biological history, and the validity of evolution as a process. I'll discuss historical biology second, and evolution-as-a-process first.
As an abstract process, evolution will apply to essentially anything that meets four critical criteria. It requires (1) replication with (2) inheritance of traits with (3) some limited mutation of those traits,and (4) trait-based selection to repeat the cycle. A cycle of 1 replication, 2 inheritance, 3 mutation, 4 selection.
It happens to be very easy to implement those four steps in software and data on a computer. Digitally implemented evolution. In computer science this field is called Genetic Algorithms. Software algorithms that "do" the evolutionary process. I happen to be a programmer and I have in fact personally preformed experiments with the process of evolution, and I have personally witnessed the results. As an abstract process, as a mathematical process, as an in
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Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred.
Half right.
Your right about the species part, populations that no longer breed with each other is the generally used definition for species. However you're wrong about the MACRO-evolution part.
Evolution does not say macro-evolution has occurred, because there's no such thing in evolution. It's like talking about macro-gravity or macro-electricity or macro-atoms.
There's no such thing as macro-evolution. Evolution says that there are small changes, and that they accumulate over time. Over a larger amount of time there is a larger number of changes. However there is absolutely NO evolutionary line dividing "micro" from "macro". And the evolution-denialists pushing this micro vs macro thing have failed to ever identify any such line. It is a fictional line, they simply wishfully believe that it must be floating around out there somewhere.
Is there a "macro" difference between lions and tigers? Some of them will try to say yes, and others will will say no and try to push the line somewhere else. The fact is that no such dividing line exists, and evolution-denialists can't come up with any coherent agreement on where that line lies, much less any coherent explanation of what the line is and exactly how "macro" evolution is actually different than "micro", and what the barrier is between them. There is no barrier, and they have been absolutely incapable of identifying one.
The best they've got is "gee, a horse looks a LOT different than a fish, so I'm gonna call that MACRO". Yeah, and a molecule with a million carbon atoms looks and behaves a hell of a lot different than a molecule with two carbon atoms. The former is a tiny diamond, the latter is a gas molecule. So by that logic there is some sort of dividing line between micro-chemistry and macro-chemistry.... they accept micro-chemistry but macro-chemistry is wrong and impossible.
Yes, there's huge number of tiny differences between horses and fish, but none that constitute any sort of impassible MACRO evolutionary barrier. They can't say what that supposed barrier is or where it is or how it works. They just don't understand it and moreover they don't WANT to understand it. They are too busy presuming to tell God how He is and is not allowed to run things. They decided that if evolution is true, if that is how God choose to do things, then they decided God is forbidden to exist.
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If an individual strays too far genetically, God drops a rock on it.
>Thunk<
OUCH!
Anyone got an aspirin? My head's killing me!
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For what it's worth, aside from the video itself being dishonest which I won't blame you for, I think the troll mod you got hit with was unjustified. You made some reasonable comments and asked a reasonable question in a reasonable manner.
The video claims to be "RAW FTGE", which I presume is supposed to mean raw footage, but it was blatantly cut and spliced at the 29-30 second mark. They deceptively cut to what is obviously an answer to a completely different question. They pulled the exact same fraud in the Expelled movie - asking Dawkins one question and then fraudulently cutting to an answer to a completely different question making it look nutty. The people making these anti-evolution propaganda pieces have more than a small problem with honesty and ethics.
But hopefully we can agree it doesn't matter what the video makers did or didn't do, and that it doesn't matter if Dawkins can or cannot answer the question. *I* will answer your question. I hope you reasonably and fairly consider my answer, and I am open to considering any objections or questions you have on it.
Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?
Yes.
There are several ways I can answer this and many examples, and I can cite and link some if you like, but this post I am going to aim for understanding. I am going to try to explain how it can happen in a way that I hope you will agree that "increase the information in the genome" obviously can and would occur. My explanation will take a few steps, but follow along and consider each point, and consider whether you agree each point is reasonable and true.
As you may know, dogs and many other animals are colorblind. There is one particular protein in eye cells that are sensitive to light. That protein is most sensitive to a certain frequency of light - a particular color. And obviously there is a gene that produces that protein.
Now consider some small mutation to that gene, one or two letters of DNA get damages or mis-copied. That DNA will then produce a almost the same protein, but with some small change at one particular spot in the molecule. That can have several possible effects. For one, it may have no effect. The protein may still work. Lets ignore that. A change at some other point may change the protein such that it no longer works - such that it is no longer light sensitive. Well in that case any children carrying that mutation will be blind. We can pretty much assume those blind animals will die, that mutation dies out. We can ignore that too. However there's a third interesting possibility. The vision protein may change a tiny bit such that it is still light sensitive, but it is most sensitive to a slightly different frequency of light. An animal carrying that mutation will still be colorblind - it will still see in black and white - however its vision will will be changed to see a different frequency of light - it will see in black and white based on the brightness of a different color of light.
A this point it would be an extremely weak claim to try to assert that constitutes an "increase in information". In fact I'm not going to make such a claim. Not yet, not here, not with just that. So let's set that animal aside for just a moment, and keep following along.
I want you to consider a different very simple mutation. Consider when DNA is getting copied, part of that DNA gets copied twice in a row. Instead of getting ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, you get ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. The LMNOP in the middle doubled. If LMNOP was the light sensitive vision gene, then the animal will have two copies of the gene. It wouldn't really have any effect on the animal. It would just go about life normally, and having children with the harmless two-copies of the gene.
And no, I'm not going to claim that this mutation increases information either. It's just the same information appearing twice. But follow me just one more moment.
Now lets cons
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You do the same thing. If you say "nature created life" it begs the question "who created nature?"
I believe you are misapplying the phrase begging the question, but that's an irrelevant nitpick.
One can say the universe has always existed (which is no less reasonable than an assertion that God always existed!), or one can say God created the universe, or one can simply answer "science has no good data or answer for that question yet", but in no case does it in any way undermine the fact that evolution is true. All evidence demonstrates the fundamental validity of evolution.
One can say "If chemistry is true, then where did elements come from?". It doesn't matter if an atheistic universe naturally created the elements, it doesn't matter if God created the elements, it doesn't matter if you ask the question in the year 1900 and all the best scientists on the planet answer "we have no clue where elements came from". *Today* we know the science of nuclear fusion, and that that is how elements were made, but there is absolutely nothing wrong if science says it has no answer and no clue on explaining the origin of the elements.
All the evidence still proves CHEMISTRY is still true, no matter what anyone knows or doesn't know about the origins of elements. All the evidence still proves EVOLUTION is still true, no matter what anyone knows or doesn't know about the origins of life or the origin of the universe.
Science says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. Evolution says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God.
Chemistry is true, and if God exists then chemistry is one of God's chosen mechanisms for running the universe.
Evolution is true, and if God exists then evolution is one of God's chosen mechanisms for running the universe.
If you think evolution and God are in conflict, then you have a problem with God. You have the hubris to tell God how he is and is not permitted to run His universe.
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if you're not precise with your words, the ID crowd get funny ideas.
Yeah, right. As if they don't get funny ideas when we *are* precise :)
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Rather, I'm suggesting that scientists (both theist and atheist) recognize (and be transparent about) when their preferred form of that axiom comes into play in forming their conclusions.
I don't think it does affect their conclusions. By limiting itself to the natural world, science keeps itself open to people regardless of their views on other subjects. That's why Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists can all be scientists and come to the same conclusions. That's also why scientists who embrace all sorts of different philosophies on other subjects still almost universally embrace evolution as the best scientific theory to explain the why living things are the way they are.
I'm not talking about introduction to philosophy of science here, but rather a bit more depth than that ...
You want to say that the philosophical assumptions underlying science aren't being admitted, even though they are explicitly discussed at the beginning of everyone's education in science. You can't ignore a fact, claim the opposite, and then try to get out of it by stating that you're going "more in depth".
Even if you choose to attempt (and I say attempt because it really is impossible) to demarcate science along some reasonable boundaries, ID should be included (and if your choice of demarcation criteria somehow excludes ID, then evolution is also equally excluded).
Science only explains the physical world in terms of the physical world - that's the boundary. As long as the version of ID that you're proposing includes supernatural influence (God designed it), it's not science. Versions of ID without the supernatural (at least so far) end up merely being appeals to ignorance - which don't explain anything.
No, I think it's clear that I've read a great deal about both science and philosophy, while you've stuck with creationist propaganda. Cheers!
They tend to think we're crazy, you know, because what we say has never occurred before so it's outside their 'comfort zone'. They also use terms like 'predicting the future' because knowing it is foreign to them. Interesting thing is, if you only look at the future, you actually have to make guess/predictions about the past.
Either way, you're running around half blind. The current world situation isn't going to get any better until humans start understanding and utilizing both ways of perceiving that they are 'designed' for.
BTW, Roman catholic orthodox, the source of the trinity poison and mother of the divided church today, that whore of babylon, they don't look to kindly on the old testament.
Oh, i do believe Jesus existed. Too many scriptures (besides the ones the bible includes) talk about him. When you have other cultures talking about the crazy love hippy, there must be something there. I'll reiterate, the Trinity story is a poison meant to keep all the 'evil sinners' in place.
Is this really news for nerds, cause it look like dem nerds dunno ow to tink!
Why does everybody assume that because there are similarities it must be duplication? Then we conveniently don't mention the similarities in other creation myths that had no immediate physical/cultural contact.
um, the social reasons are actually the whole point of christianity. It started off as a big love-in community. Course, jesus goes away for a bit and the disciples start to stray! Using your faith to wipe out a couple cause they want to keep a few of their belongings doesn't sound very 'christiany' to me :)
The "classic religious position" probably refers to pre-enlightenment religious doctrine, which is echoed in today's Religious Right.
Not just religious doctrine. It's the way everybody understood the world to work, because there was no credible alternative at the time.
The Catholic acceptance of evolution is largely the result of an especially moderate Pope.
I like to think it's because the Vatican learned from its mistakes. Like the Galilei fiasco. Nowadays, the Vatican is seriously and earnestly interested in science (physics and similar exact sciences at least).
By and large the religious elite of today are still hostile to evolution, in spite of the more moderate "flocks" they tend to.
Who exactly do you consider to be the religious elite? There's a very vocal minority in the US that's hostile to evolution, but I as a christian don't listen to them, and certainly don't see them as some sort of elite.
You're correct that many people who identify themselves as religious have a worldview that includes evolution. These people either go to small liberal churches or quickly learn to keep their opinions to themselves.
You're wrong.
Where does it get the additional genetic information to construct feathers? Incomplete, nonfunctional feathers or other structures are useless for survival and are therefore not passed on to succeeding generations.
Please continue running down the path of entropy and irreducible complexity.
Unless a feature confers a distinct advantage on an organism, it is invisible to the natural selection mechanism.
Off the top of my head: Insulation, mating displays, gliding.
(... by choosing which wolves to mate we've managed to created teacup poodles, bulldogs and Saint Bernards in a fairly short time - don't you think similar things happen in the wild?...)
The fact is that none of these things happen in the wild, because the selective breeding of dogs is accomplished by means of the application of human intelligence. In other words there is intelligent design to produce a desired result.
No. The mechanism for evolution in the wild and directed breeding is the same, the only difference is that the selection is done on different criteria.
There is no human effort to does not involve a measure of intelligence. Why is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans credit the existence of even the existence of a single living cell to processes NOT ALSO involving intelligence and thought?
Likewise, how is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans have this desire to turn their reasoning faculties off when it comes to the topic of how life came to be?
Science is not about what was thought to have taken place an unimaginably long time ago.
Might I assume that your position is that science taught in schools should only include "facts" (by your very narrow definition of facts that say that even the fossil record is not a fact but a "witness")? If that is not your position, please clarify.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
There's lots of material written on the subject which pretty much proves that such demarcations are futile.
But separating things that are clearly scientific from religious ideas rewritten in the language of science is much easier, this isn't a gray area at all. Within the scientific community there is no controversy, they can tell the difference quite easily.
It's based on the same underlying theory as the fields of: forensic science, ...
Except for the fact that forensic scientist often try to reconstruct past events, I don't get the connection.
Which is where we get genetic algorithms, probably the best evidence of what evolution can do - including things like generate "irreducible complexity", incorporate new information, and even do some things better than humans can (like certain kinds of design work).
Which searches for artificial things, not just complexity. Finding that stars form galaxies, have a certain relationship between size, color, brightness and luminosity, and even regular bursts of radio waves from pulsars isn't evidence that they were designed, even though it's complex - it's just physics.
Keep in mind that our intuition injects purpose into everything (the gods send rain to make plants grow, the king has power because god wants him to have it). It also ascribes agency to things that clearly don't have it (yelling at cars that won't start, luck). In the same way we see faces in things are are completely random. Our intuition also keeps telling us that living things must be designed - even though we have better explanations not only for the living things, but also why our intuition keeps giving us the wrong signals.
Why is this not getting through to you? I'm referring to philosophy of *science* (i.e., the business of defining exactly what science is).
It's true that it's difficult (and perhaps impossible) to draw a bright, unambiguous line between science and non-science, but that doesn't mean that some things aren't clearly on one side or the other. There may be a gray area in English where "ginormous" might or might not be a real word, but where the words "friend" and "hte" fall isn't in dispute.
Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe ... So, at this point, if you still disagree with these statements ...
Then I disagree with some guys who've built their careers out of trying to redefine science so that it can embrace ID. If you want to see how Behe (for example) is viewed by scientists and other philosophers, look at the Dover trial :
You seem like a smart guy, but your reading material isn't giving you a real understanding of the philosophy of science.
The practice of forensic science accurately (and to the criterion of 'beyond a reasonable doubt') identifies the activity of intelligent agents in the committal of crimes in the past.
Forensic science doesn't detect intelligent agents - it simply tries to works out what happened on a physical level. We assume that people are intelligent and do things deliberately, but the leap from "his index finger pulled the trigger" to "he wanted to kill the other guy" isn't part of the science.
They rather object to neo-Darwinism (which is essentially the marriage of Darwin's theory of natural descent, abiogenesis, & the philosophy of materialism).
If you're trying to have science without materialism, meaning allowing non-physical explanations, you're trying to change the definition of science, period.
Sure, there are aspects to the SETI program which are not directly related to detecting intelligence ...
That wasn't my point. If you just hooked up a computer to a bunch of radio telescopes and had it run a pattern detector, it will go nuts with "stars come in groups" and "things far away are red-shifted", none of which implies intelligence. And even if you told it to ignore known patterns, when it comes across a pulsar it will go off again, and for a bit you'll think you've found alien navigational beacons, but they're just an unusual type of star.
Most sciences have gone though the same thing - for a long time science has no explanation, but when one was found mythology tends to fall back. The only difference between evolution/abiogenesis and other theories (like the heliocentric solar system) is that evolution more directly contradicts what many people want to believe, and thus has a stronger emotional impact, so it gets a great deal more resistance.
In this case there was a lot of word-for-word copying. So it was pretty clearly copying. And the chronology (dated) establishes who wrote the stuff first.
OTOH, this is from classes that I took decades ago, so I can't any longer quote sources. If you're interested enough it's reasonably easy to look up, but I can't even give you pointers as to where.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Almost everything i learned in anthropology, decades ago, has been supplanted. :( What we really need, which i'm working on, is something like subversion for the -ologies. It's almost impossible to track the mistakes that get propagated into diverse fields, and respective sciences tend to keep their mistakes within their own fields. Especially history, because the history you are familiar with has everything to do with where you were raised.
The point though is-- no matter which you classify it as, it's the truth that really matters and not the classification.
And that's exactly where you go wrong - science doesn't give Truth, and everything that's true isn't science. Our entire argument isn't about whether or not various ideas are correct, but merely if they are science.
Well, the problem with 'methodological naturalism' as promoted (and if I'm not mistaken, initiated) by Darwin is that it too quickly dismisses design as a potential explanation.
You are mistaken - methodological naturalism predates the precursors of science, natural philosophy and natural history, that were around in Darwin's day.
I believe it lies at equal depth as 'descent' for serving as an explanation ...
... and, for the reasons I've already given, nearly everyone who's in a good position to make that determination not only disagrees with you, but does so without reservation.
As far as I can tell, all of your misapprehensions seem to stem from the same error: you don't know what science is, because you've gotten you science education from people that want to change what the word "science" means.
it's the truth that really matters and not the classification
everything that's true isn't science
I was not speaking in the context of 'science' at that point, but rather person-to-person.
Oh. I thought you were trying to change the topic on me. Never mind.
'methodological naturalism' ... initiated by Darwin ...
methodological naturalism predates
If Darwin did not initiate this trend, then he certainly greatly advanced it (given his popularity).
Well, as long as you aren't trying to say that "Darwin took God out of science" or something, we can call this a miscommunication as well.
There are many well qualified scientists and philosophers of science on the other side of this debate.
This I still have to disagree with, and here's a more verbose explanation:
Creationism - God did it. I think we've established that this is religion, not science.
Intelligent Design - something about some living thing(s) was designed. One specific problem with this is that the only evidence that can be offered for it (given the current formulation of ID) look like this: we don't have a natural explanation for X, so X can't be natural, so it's designed. That not acceptable because it's an argument from ignorance - not knowing of another explanation isn't actual evidence in favor of it. Another problem (closely related to the first) is that - no matter how strong the case is for other explanations, or how many other things are explained, there's still always the possibility that something, somewhere was designed. The idea doesn't let you make any predictions where/what to look at, and it isn't falsifiable, and therefore it can't be a scientific theory.
Future Scientific Theory - a theory has the word 'design' in it. Neither the "intelligent" part nor the "design" part is the issue, it's the fact that it's left as vague as possible. In the future, there may be a valid theory that has those words in it - for example: intelligent aliens designed X because we have their blueprints or laboratory. This both would have valid evidence to support it (blueprints or lab), and is falsifiable (different group of aliens have better evidence that they did it, evidence from Earth shows X predates the alien's development of interstellar flight). This is what Dawkins was doing - trying to illustrate that it isn't the general idea of intelligent design per se, but the specific concept called "Intelligent Design" that isn't scientific.
If you mean the majority of scientists who further such theories as 'abiogenesis' and 'multiple universe hypothesis', then no. :) ).
They advance ideas that might some day become scientific theory later on, because scientist do need to brainstorm. Abiogenesis already has several competing hypotheses of how it could have occurred (RNA world, prions, complex chemical cycle development) and we know what kind of evidence to look for to support those separate ideas. Several versions of the the multi-universe concept have already been tested (gravitation influencing, neutrino loss, dark matter explaining), and while they were disproved, the fact that they could be disproved shows that those more specific theories are scientific. Intelligent design could do the same thing (go from sci-fi/philosophical speculation to scientific hypothesis), but to get there you need to add to it so that it makes predictions, is falsifiable, and has actual evidence (and since the person who manages to do that will have a good shot at a Nobel Prize, don't expect me to come up with it for a Slashdot post
If it is not 'truth' which science is after, what is it, deception?
Science only proposes some approximations of what appears to be true. Because it only proposes it's always capable of being refuted when we find new evidence, because it's approximate there's always the possibility of a better theory explaining more or in m
No mod points but a good, thought out and logically laid out response nonetheless.
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I know many Christians who believe in both ID and alien civilizations.
I'm not sure I'd call that ID, then.
Cases like those seem to be why those specific words were chosen to represent the movement. Reasonable people think, "I believe in a God that designed the universe...so that's intelligent design, right?". An easy mistake to make, but it's still a mistake. ID is a placeholder for creationism, something which becomes obvious as you compare older editions of Pandas to ones published following Edwards v. Aguillard. They essentially used a massive find/replace to switch "Creationism" with ID, leaving the rest of the content alone.
Now, following Kitzmiller v. Dover, the euphemism has become "teach the controversy". Rest assured this has nothing to do with believing in a God who created us, or even finding legitimate fault with the theory of evolution. It has to do with captial-c creationism. Most people believe in God, but I doubt highly that aliens jive with a literal Genesis ch 1 & 2.
Of course, your friends who believe in ID probably wouldn't admit to evolutionary links between humans and earlier primates, so they'd probably be fine with the term creationism anyway. It's SCOTUS that wasn't.
Overgeneralize much? Perhaps you are trolling but the fact is there exist many more Christians who are willing to allow context in their interpretations of Biblical meaning. I don't get the literal readings myself, but I don't try to scare people into thinking that every Christian does that, either.
I can't speak for a whole religion but I'd guess that most Christians take the "New Testament" to be mostly fact, (except for Revelation, perhaps), while treating the "Old Testament" as more of a collection of stories and tradition.
The main function of the Hebrew Scriptures in a Christian Bible is to support the Christians belief that Jesus's coming fulfilled prophecies that are made in those scriptures. Apart from a handful of more memorable stories, like that of Job or Samson, anything not directly relating to the coming of a messiah is pretty much forgotten about.
Nobody likes to admit it, but there you go.
Oral tradition is not "one guy".
But you're right. He would have done better to point out the fact that even Genesis contains two different creation stories.
I'm sure your mind is not going to be changed by one comment, but let me just say that 2 Peter 3:8 has to do with the second coming, not creation.
It also says that a day is *like* a thousand years. *Like* is an important word. Leaving out certain words definitely qualifies as "bending". And Peter was quoting an earlier psalm, which says that a thousand years are like a day or a night, and for whatever reason nobody tries to shove the nights in there too.
The whole thing just requires too much mental acrobatics for me, but I acknowledge that it's horses for courses. I know that I can go to the Museum of Natural History and see things that are older than the "thousand years in a day" equivalency allows for, so I'm happy to just avoid the whole thing.
ID isn't nonsensical if you see it as an attempt to keep creationist text books in circulation following the Supreme Court's decision in 1987 that creationism was unscientific and favored a particular religion. The king is dead, long live the king!
Exactly. And we need to have some compassion for the anti-evolutionists, because in their heart they really do believe that evolution (or "Darwinism") == godlessness. Just like the belief that atheism is incompatible with morality, which necessarily comes from God.
None of that is rational, but who said this was about reason? It's about someone telling you every day in your childhood that evolution leads to violence and teenage pregnancy, until that sounds plausible. They're not doing this to piss people off, they're doing it to save everyone's souls. :/