"There's no need for scientific evidence to know, for example, that you're in love or feeling depressed."
But these are feelings. "Feeling" that you are in love is automatically true, becaues feeling is just an expression of an experience. But "feeling" that a truth claim is accurate is not the same thing as it being true.
""You must unify your own side and divide the other side," Johnson said. He added that he wants to temporarily suspend the debate between young-Earth creationists, who insist that the planet is only 6,000 years old, and old-Earth creationists, who accept that the Earth is ancient. This debate, he said, can be resumed once Darwinism is overthrown. (Johnson, himself an old-Earth creationist, did not explain how the two camps would reconcile this tremendous gap.)"
ID people are notoriously shifty on exactly what it is they actually believe about anything at all. They are known for saying one thing in public, and a very different thing to friendly audiences. ID doesn't require any particular beliefs about creationism, but historically, it's plain that the current movement is by and large its a movement creationists formed as they got more savvy about how they needed to act in order to hopefully overcome court rulings and the court of public opinion.
You can, actually. 3 is not about everything being TOTALLY outside God's influence, just substantially. Many believers think it important that God at least intended the world to be complex enough that complex life would arise, and of the sort that could relate to God. But God could leave most of the rest to work itself out.
And remember: these are offered as possibilities for solving the dispute. Yuop can accept any or none of them as needed. I don't accept any of them because I see no reason to justify a God I don't believe in (since I see no reason to believe). But others do care, and are interested. They can believe the strongest form of 1 (God determined absolutely everything AND from our perspective it looks exactly like random chance) or the strongest form of 3 (that God left everything up to chance and then contacts people if and as they request him).
I agree about the hyberbole, but I do think there is a very real and legitimate problem in that it seems like lots of the people with locked up without any recourse (until the SC stepped in in a limited way, and still without much help) that have turned out to be completely innocent people who were basically sold to the US (we offered a reward for anyone without caring much who they really were or if they really were against) for money. Many of the people in Gitmo do not fit any of the definitions required even for enemy combatants: they were not demonstrably bearing arms, against the US or anyone else. They were sold to us by money by tribel warlords who had every reason to lie.
"Harris's point is that what the moderate disregards is somewhat arbitrary."
While true, this point is not exactly new nor is it some powerful blow against moderates that has no possible reply. Heck, many NON moderates: many near fundamentalists believe in a sort of "bible is not enough" view in which prayer and inspiration from God override Biblical commands, which people may not properly understand. And many moderates believe that the Bible is imperfect: that the Torah is not really God's laws or opinions directly, but part of a developing tradition of stories that all fall into an attempt to understand God.
"Well actually, Harris argues for an end to Faith period. No faith. One of the major points of his book is that faith is dangerous and debilitating in many ways."
I agree with this idea. Indeed, I'm an atheist. But I'm also a realist, and I don't think this argument is really all that strong, or that everyone will accept that all faith is bad. Some people think that THEIR particular faith is good. And frankly, by and large they seem right: it isn't bad. Harris makes a case that fundamentalists are the "real deal" when it comes to religion, and moderates are just imperfect or would be atheists who can't give up something that's fundamentally bad. I disagree.
"Yes, fuzzy things and things that could be gotten without faith."
To a certain degree, I don't argee. Moral values have no objective basis that could convince all comers. Either you believe that something is wrong, REALLY is wrong, or you don't. It's not the same sort of faith as faith that the earth is 6000 years old, but I don't see how anyone can think that "rape is wrong" is something one can rationally prove, as opposed to just feeling or believing. I'm not saying that faith in a GOD is necessary to believe those things, just that given that morality is pretty hard to justify, I'm not prepared to rule anything out as one way to get there either.
"This wouldn't be so bad in it's self, except that Harris makes some more arguments that I don't want to spoil."
Why not spoil them? I've read the book, you've mostly read it, so we might as well discuss them.
I have read it. I bought it when it first came out. I believe I even saw him give a talk at the Center for Inquiry. But I disagree with him. What you just said has almost nothing to do with what I said. I said that it is legitimate to be a theist and not read the Bible literally: to even think that it is grossly imperfect and misguided at times. What you said was that it is not necessary to believe to have good values. I completely agree. And I never said anything against that idea! I just think that the idea that theists who are not fundamentalists are "bad theists" is flawed.
Well of course, and I think any reader of my post would see that I meant that theists would accepted those things COULD have a via theology that even atheists could find little factual complaint in (other than that they don't believe it)
"As an atheist, I find many of the acts of the god described in the Old Testament to be repugnant and immoral."
But many theists do as well. That's why they think that the Bible is man's imperfect record of an imperfect and confused, but improving, experience with god.
In this case though, its just the opposite. These kids are being told not to believe what evidence says unless it says what they want to hear and that unless they see something with their eyes then it's lies (i.e. trust your desires and own potentially faliable personal experience INSTEAD of direct physical evidence).
In fact, Kenneth Miller has advanced a very plausible religious view in his book "Finding Darwin's God" that reconciles the two. It's based on several ideas:
1) If God knows all causality, then he could have brought about everything into being originally AND have it, from science's view BE random and undetermined. The two are not mutally exclusive when God is the best pool player of all time, setting up the most elaborate shot of all time. 2) God could act via influencing things in ways that, due to quantum outcomes, would indeed be like magic to us, and undetectable or testable (hence we can still believe in a God that does miracles) 3) Evolution itself has plenty of room for a valid new theology based on the idea that God would WANT life to be free of God's direct design. This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain it, it's perfectly plausible.
If the above is true, then both atheists and theists can agree on everything concerning the physical world, without conflict. The atheists certainly wont agree with the faith theology above, but the theists can believe it without having to make any claims that have consequences which rule out the legitimacy of atheism (i.e. the not believing because there is no good evidence kind)
Harris is wrong simply because disregarding large portions of the text or interpreting other parts as metaphorical is perfectly legitimate as a belief system. How can he possibly argue otherwise? Who is he to say on what someone's faith should be built upon? Especially when for most religious moderates, their "faith" is primarily about values and life lessons and human feelings, not dogmas.
Many people don't really know anything about who he was or what he thought or how it applies to modern biology.
The guy was: 1) A careful and thoughtful scientist who spent countless hours studying tihngs most people would find incrediby boring. Darwin spent EIGHT YEARS studying BARNACLES. 2) Fairly shy. 3) A Christian for most of his life, and only an agnostic in later life (which had more to do historically with death in the family than with evolution, just ike Lincoln's rediscovering of Christianity)
The guy is/was NOT: 1) a guy who's ideas are a dogma. What Darwin thought is historically important in the development of evolution, but has no bearing on what and where that theory will lead. 2) 100% right about a LOT of things. He not only got the patterns of heredity completely wrong (he thought it was analog: by trait blending, when it was really digital), but was embarassingly forced to admit it when people with better arguments pointed out that blending was in contradiction with the evidence. 3) Someone that thought fossils had proved his case. To Darwin, fossils showed mainly the fact that past life was very different from present life: hence that most of species that existed in the past no longer existed in his day. This was one of the chief inspirations for his idea. The current creationist obsession with fossils overlooks the fact that Darwin put forward his theory, and was considered to be correct, long before we had anything like the fantastically rich fossil record of today. Darwin predicted that future fossils would all confirm his theory, but he NEVER expected that we'd find anywhere as many as we have, or that an entirely unimaginable field (genetics) would someday come to exist and provide an indepedent second check on the fossil record, allowing us to figure out actual lineages.
Darwin also didn't propose that the origins of life were part of evolution. The most he ever said on the subject was that maybe life had started in some warm little pool somewhere... in a private letter. He didn't publish this idea as scientific work.
There are so many misconceptions about the man that this otherwise fairly reserved guy is just buried under layers of legend. He was neither an exceptional genius and phropet, nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist. He was a bright, studious man who worked hard, amassed tons of evidence, and hit upon a stunningly innovative realization about how evolution could have occured (one which was as much due to the new discoveries in geology and biology of his time as to his own thinking: as is obvious from the fact that no one in the history of earth had thought of it before... and then suddenly two guys did indepedently around the same time). He's worth remembering and learning about, not worshiping or demonizing.
You are acting like there is some sort of binary: either they know for certain, or its just a guess. This is nonsense. Some things are known to a very high degree of certainty, because multiple lines of evidence all converge. Sometimes things are less well supported... and people generally say so.
"In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate."
Uhhhh.... bull. Discarding fossils because there is no way they can be so old? DARWIN? Kiddo, there wasn't even a well developed idea about the age of the earth when Darwin was around, much less a sense of the complete collumn. Methinks you got this story a bit mixed up.
"Lots of things have evolved more than once (wings is probably the most typical example)."
Well, that's not quite true. Things with similar general functions have evolved twice (convergent evolution) but they are always morphologically different, since evolving the thing the same way twice just isn't even remotely likely.
Uh, but there are feathered dinosaurs. The question here is whether there are feathers on THIS particular class of dinosaur, which there doesn't seem to be any direct evidence of yet, and the original submitter of the story added.
But there are, in fact, several dinosaurs that have feathers.
"D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? "
No, but then popular artists aren't scientists, they are journalists.
"Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said." Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did."
You're confused. The reasoning here is that evolution works only forwards: descent with modification. So if the group from which T-rexes and birds came from had feathers, and birds have feathers, then T-rexes either T-rexes lost their feathers somehow, or the feathered dino is not actually directly related to the T-rex though it is an ancestor of birds (since features are very very unlikely to evolve more than once in the same way, with the same morphology). So the logic is actually a lot stronger than you let on. Of course, I dunno if some of the feathered dinos are actually thought to be directly ancestral to T-rexes, but that's the basic logic, and it's quite sound.
The same logic undergirds the prediction that if birds have a currently unique tissue type, and they are descended from dinos, then its quite likely that dinos had the same tissue type or a similar precusor that doesn't exist in other lines of descent. And, in fact, they do! A T-rex bone of high enough quality to distinguish tissue types was found, and it had a tissue type previously unique to birds in the animal kingdom.
"One of, if not THE central claim of evolution is that the more complex life-forms evolved from the simpler ones."
Indeed.
"Taking two creatures from the same grouping of complexity and making a hybrid of similar complexity does NOT prove that central tenet."
It proves a key component of the idea: that as species diverge from each other genetically and morphologicaly, they become less and less genetically similar and less and less genetically compatible. If evolution is true, then we should be able to find species that have diverged from a common ancestor, but can still hybridize. And we can. The underlying genetics are, in fact, not even really a mystery. We can see how lines diverge and steadily become too different to be compatible. Human and chimpanzee genomes, for instance, are different ona gross scale mostly only in that one of our chromosomes is version that is fused together from two of what they have. The tell-tale telomere ends are even sitting in the middle of that chromosome, evidence of the past.
"A donkey and a horse are both about equally complex and I suspect so are the dolphin and the killer whale example."
This idea of "equally complex" doesn't actually mean anything. All these different species have different genomes.
"Evolutionists claim for example, that birds evolved from reptiles. A valid experimental proof of this idea would be to make some kind of bird from two reptiles."
No, you are still confused as to what we are experimenting ON. We do experiments on the evidence to see if it shows what it seems to: that birds indeed are historically offshoots of the dinosaurs. If that is true, then we should be able to find fossils that hve features unique to dinosaurs and modern birds. And that's exactly what we found. And this theory is constantly confirmed whenever we turn up new evidence. For instance, when we finally found a remnant of a T-rex with high enough quality to see something about tissue types, we found that T-rexes have a tissue type in their bones that currently only modern birds have.
Asking for science to "reproduce" the entire ancestry of dinosaurs to birds is insane. It took trillions of individuals (along with countless species) across the entire globe over millions of years for that to happen. What scientists look for is evidence of this process having happened: if birds evolved from dinosaurs via reproduction there are all sorts of things which MUST be found in the physical evidence if it is true.
We no more need to reproduce the entire history of all life in the lab than we need to reproduce Thomas Jefferson sleeping with Sally Hemmings to demonstrate that it happened. The evidence of his change is found in the physical evidence that tells that a history, including the record left in genomes. The experiments are done on that evidence, and to produce and discover that evidence as well as to work out what the mechanism was.
"A simpler experiment with two very different single celled creatures would certainly also prove the possibility of making a more complex creature from one or more simple ones."
Single-celled creatures, FYI, generally do not reproduce sexually. They evolve directly, via mutation.
In this respect, we've seen bacteria evolve entirely new metabolic pathways in the lab and all sorts of things that most certainly are increases in functional complexity.
"Even taking a relatively small collection of the same type of cells, say amoebas and fashioning a new self reproducing organism from them would certainly prove that this claim of evolution is a fact. The claim that the complex arises from the simple has never been tested by experiment."
Not only has evolution been shown, in a lab, to increase complexity and add new features, but we have a rich history of evidence that it has done so in the case of all life on earth.
You should also probably be aware that evolution happens to large populations over time, not individuals. It isn't a matter of two creatu
"Living things are much more diverse than manmade devices, but nevertheless have many common design features."
Common design features are not at all demanded by design (since design demands nothing in particular at all: that's why it's useless as an explanation), but they are absolutely demanded by common descent. And not just similarities: a very very specific pattern of similarities.
"The underlying chemistry of life with its DNA codes is a tried and true design, just as 4 wheels are in an automobile."
The problem is that the underlying genetics goes even farther than that. The similarities in life can be grouped into relations that extend beyond even the functional parts: even the non-coding areas bear distinct features that can be grouped into a family tree that in turn makes sense as a timeline and is confirmed by every different way of looking at it. There is nothing necessary about having the exact same number of hair follicles as apes, nor is there something special about the exact design of our molars. But if evolution is true, then these sorts of similarities are absolutely required. They HAVE to fit all the rest of the evidence in the same way that everything says they should.
One of the most interesting are atavisms. These are when supressed aspects of your ancestor's genetic code accidentaly get expressed. The result is humans with tails, whales with legs, and so on: all betraying their past ancestry.
"The very nature of bio-identification, such as fingerprints, iris scans and the blood vessels in the palm of your hands depend on the uniqueness of each individual."
Yes. Though, of course, fingerprints are a fairly recent development in the history of life. It's also a key requirement of evolution via natural selection that there be a wide range of variation to choose from. And as you have conceded, there is.
"The structure of hemoglobin is similar in all mammals."
Indeed it is. But it's also slightly different across mammals. And the differences all fit into a specific pattern of relation via modification. The mammals who are most distantly related to us, as shown by fossil records, happen to have hemoglobin sequences which are less like ours than any other mammals. And so on. All mammals can be fit into a family tree that when arranged in the way that the genes and fossils suggest, show clear lines of descent with modification along the way.
"Physiologically, you (and I) are much more similar in many ways to a pig than any ape."
I'm afraid that is flat out false. You may have been confused by the fact that we use pigs for human-hybrid experiments. But this is because pigs are much cheaper and easier to keep, and they breed faster, and so on, than apes. There is only one major NEW morphological feature that humans have that othre apes don't: the indentation at the roof of your mouth, allowing you to make sophisticated sounds of language that other apes cannot.
"Similarities of design in no way proves descent. Living things are both similar in many ways, yet all individually different."
And it is the _specific_ patterns of similarities and differences that demonstrate common descent. Just as you are genetically most like your parents, and less so your grandparents, so are humans genetically most like chimps, and less so gibbons. Lo and behold, this is the exact pattern and timeline that the fossil record shows. The genetic record matches the fossil record (which would be totally inconcievably by mere chance) and both match all other observed facts about the history of life on earth.
"My main contention is that true science requires EXPERIMENTATION to prove a theory. Before experimental science was born, philosophers had all sorts of theories about the world we live in. Most of them were disproved by experiments, often at great cost, to the early brave souls who went against the prevailing wisdom."
Indeed. And evolutionary science is chock full of experimentation. Why were you under the impr
It's interesting that you brought up the example of cars, because of course cars do not and cannot be made to fit into a tree of descent with modification like living things. With cars, features and traits can spread across lineages without any regard to time and space connections being necessary between models. That's the sort of thing that designers do. And that's completely absent, in every regard, from biological life.
In biological life, we end up with patterns that are necessarily linked in both time and space, with groups of traits that radiate and descend forwards in time, never laterally (like what happens all the time with designed cars).
"If any thing this tends to show that whoever DESIGNED the ape used some similar components for you and me to accomplish the task of chewing food."
Since if the parts were different, you'd just say that the designer was being creative, this sentance is nothing more than ad hoc. It doesn't show anything, because it risks nothing.
On the other hand, if an ape like a human being had feathers: something that it would be child's play for a designer to do, then evolution would clearly be proven false. And yet we never see anything like that happening.
"Human designers do that all the time -- re-use operational components for similar purposes."
Really. They just happened to pick the exact same number of hair follicles for you as they did when they "designed" an ape. They happened to pick the exact same particularlistic shape of of molar: a type of molar that arose only once, and only appears in creatures after it first arose in apes, and then only in apes. And they, in fact, made humans simply by slightly modifying the traits of a basal ape... but never in any way that would make any description that sets apes apart from all other monkeys and primates and mammals not then also apply to human beings. And of course, this designer arranged all of this not just so that there would be a morphological tree of features, but so that the genetic code, even the non-coding parts, would demonstrate exactly the same line of descent in exactly the same way that paternity tests can tell you who you are related to.
This article, in a word, is bunk. The claims this guy is making are goofy and demonstrably misinformed about what evolutionary theory is.
Some basic background:
Punk eek was opposed to phyletic uniformatism/gradualism (which many consider to have been a cheap straw man anyway). This was a debate over macroevolutionary history: the patterns of large scale morphological and species change. Contrary to popular opinion, macroevolutionary change is subject to all sorts of different forces: things like large scale, genetic drift, extinction events, and so on. No biologist claims that natural selection is the only factor in the particular history of life on earth.
This guy is is not talking about things on the scale of punk eek. He's talking about things on the scale of microevolution, and what he's proposing seems to be a form of saltationism. At best, he's attacking a purported gradualism in actual mutation rates (which itself is nonsense: it's mainstream genetics that different species have all sorts of different mutation rates as well as different rates of morphological change). But for all the rhetoric, nothing he says that's actually correct is even slightly revolutionary. At best, he's proposing another mechanism for variation: variation that involves "good tricks" in a certain genomic sequence that environmental stressors can make happen in many different individuals at once. But variation of ANY sort still just provides the raw material for natural selection to work on. And without natural selection at work, mutation would still be just ultimately random garbage. It's only by placing mutations through the sieve of actually being expressed in individuals that any information about the environment can be imprinted onto a given gene pool. That's the only way we know of that random jostling can be transformed into functional movement. For the mutations to somehow "predict" or "will themselves" to happen in certain linked ways that have a non-random purpose requires some other mechanism, and this guy proposes nothing.
And that's me being the most charitable. Most of the rest of what the guy says is just total nonsense. For instance, he implies that cellular repair systems resist mutation (heck, he even speaks about whether they "willingly" resist change or not!). Well... yes. But they fail. All the time. Most everyone reading this has recent and unique several mutations, right now. And that's not even to mention that you'd have to be grossly misinformed about Darwin to think that "Darwins theory" says ANYTHING about genetic mutation. Darwin hadn't a clue what genes or DNA or the rest of it even were! All he spoke about was the differential success of different variations. Of course, what Darwin thought is irrelevant trivia to what is true in biology, but still, this guy is just showing both his ignorance and his obsession with the idea that Darwin is some sort of "high priest" whom he is fighting against.
Now consider this: "according to Schwartz, mutations occur recessively and are passed unknowingly until the mutation saturates the population. Then, when members of the population receive two copies of the mutation, the trait appears suddenly."
Either the reporter got this wrong, or this guy is really misinformed. Mutations can be recessive or dominant. Nothing about them makes them occur "recessively" only. While the scenario he describes can and does happen (recessive traits that don't really start appearing in force in a population until they become near fixed), nothing about it is particularly revolutionary. And something with complex functionality and specification like fully formed "teeth" is not going to evolve completely out of sight, unexpressed, and then burst onto the scene all at once. That, kids, is called saltation, and while big saltationist jumps can certainly happen (and can spring out via the recessive/dominant pathway), they are very very very unlikely to ever hit upon something functional and useful. Remember: only the actual testing
"Neither of the above can be "proved", but you may believe one or the other. "
Common descent is proven, sorry. If you are not an ape, descended from other apes, then what are ape molars doing in your mouth? How come you have exactly the same number of hair folicles as an ape? Why do you have the same sort of rotational shoulder that is unique to apes? And so on. You can't escape placing humanity, as well as every other creature, into a single tree of descent. The evidence converges from so many different lines of independent proof that it's simply unavoidable.
"I know plenty of people (especially on Slashdot) who still believe the old "millions of years of small gradual changes" bit."
There's nothing substantially wrong with that statement at all, as long as no one thinks that "gradual" means "evenly paced morphologic change." In terms of actual adaptive change, evolution is still the accumulation of small changes no matter how you slice it. There are certainly some seemingly major jumps, but these are in fact themselves fairly simple in terms of the complexity of the underlying genetics.
Read the quotes from the guy. It looks like he's the one going gonzo: all these quotes about "dogmatism" and "I've disproved Darwin bwahahaha!"
At best, what he describes is one of MANY known engines of variation in genomes. The idea that discovering a mechanism of increased variation is a challenge to the idea of natural selection is utterly absurd. This really sounds like the case of a US crackpot who is hyping beyond recognition the otherwise perfectly mainstream work of an Italian scientist.
"Whereas Darwin said that species tend to change gradually overtime, Stephen Gould argued that species are static for long periods of time (equilbrium) until something dramatic happens (the punctuation). He argued that species evolve relatively quickly during events like ice ages, famines, massive volcanoes, meteor strikes."
As many people have pointed out, Gould overplayed his hand on this. Darwin's "gradualism" was essentially borrowed from geology: it was in contrast to catastrophism. But it doesn't necessarily imply steady, even speed change. THAT idea, known as phyletic gradualism, was popular in the early 20th century, and it is THAT which scientists now agree is bogus.
"P.E. is the only theory (that I know of) that adequately explains why for billions of years life was single celled and simple."
If this is what people are saying about PE, then they are being very deceptive. Life was indeed single celled for a long time, but there's no special reason to think that this is troubling, and it certainly doesn't mean that it was simple. The basic mechanisms of cells are no small matter at all, and a HUGE a part of our genome is spent on defining these sorts of functions. In some sense, all the supposed more complex features are just afterthought and minor additions, at least in terms of the genome. Multicellularity may seem important to us, but to a genome, it's just another trait, and there's no inevitability about it.
"Then, during the Precambrian Explosion some 500 million years ago, life exploded into every form of multicellular life seen today."
The PREcambrian explosion?! It was the Cambrian explosion that got people all worked up (the PreCambrian is basically everything prior to the Cambrian). But it hasn't really panned out quite as billed, and most of what people think about it is grossly misleading. In addition to finding plenty of precambrian precusors at this point, most people think that the major innovation of the Cambrian era was hard parts: things that fossilize easily.
"During those few million years every phyla in existence today came onto the scene."
Well... not really, and the significance one takes from this is probably based on being misinformed about the taxonomic system. Every living thing at ANY period HAS to have had ancestors in the past. The more distant of these ancestors have higher level taxonomic classifications because thats how taxonomy works: species build out the bottom of the tree, off the tips of the branches.
It looks like the mess Gould made of educating people about biology is alive and well.
If thats all they are saying, then what is all this stuff about "challenging evolution" or dogmatism and all this other nonsense. At most, this guy is presenting a new mechanism for variation wherein certain "good trick" stressors cause similar mutations in certain circumstances. Frankly, sounds pretty implausible to me, but even if it were true, I don't see how we get from there to "indoctrination" and al this othre nonsense. This guy sounds like a bit of a crackpot as far as his rhetoric goes.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's no need for scientific evidence to know, for example, that you're in love or feeling depressed."
But these are feelings. "Feeling" that you are in love is automatically true, becaues feeling is just an expression of an experience. But "feeling" that a truth claim is accurate is not the same thing as it being true.
Not all creationists believe that the earth is 6000 years old. That's what OEC is all about.
w ww.au.org/churchstate/cs4995.htm
The proponents of ID deliberately took this into account as a tactical decision. Here's the basic reasoning:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010508032051/http://
""You must unify your own side and divide the other side," Johnson said. He added that he wants to temporarily suspend the debate between young-Earth creationists, who insist that the planet is only 6,000 years old, and old-Earth creationists, who accept that the Earth is ancient. This debate, he said, can be resumed once Darwinism is overthrown. (Johnson, himself an old-Earth creationist, did not explain how the two camps would reconcile this tremendous gap.)"
ID people are notoriously shifty on exactly what it is they actually believe about anything at all. They are known for saying one thing in public, and a very different thing to friendly audiences. ID doesn't require any particular beliefs about creationism, but historically, it's plain that the current movement is by and large its a movement creationists formed as they got more savvy about how they needed to act in order to hopefully overcome court rulings and the court of public opinion.
You can, actually. 3 is not about everything being TOTALLY outside God's influence, just substantially. Many believers think it important that God at least intended the world to be complex enough that complex life would arise, and of the sort that could relate to God. But God could leave most of the rest to work itself out.
And remember: these are offered as possibilities for solving the dispute. Yuop can accept any or none of them as needed. I don't accept any of them because I see no reason to justify a God I don't believe in (since I see no reason to believe). But others do care, and are interested. They can believe the strongest form of 1 (God determined absolutely everything AND from our perspective it looks exactly like random chance) or the strongest form of 3 (that God left everything up to chance and then contacts people if and as they request him).
I agree about the hyberbole, but I do think there is a very real and legitimate problem in that it seems like lots of the people with locked up without any recourse (until the SC stepped in in a limited way, and still without much help) that have turned out to be completely innocent people who were basically sold to the US (we offered a reward for anyone without caring much who they really were or if they really were against) for money. Many of the people in Gitmo do not fit any of the definitions required even for enemy combatants: they were not demonstrably bearing arms, against the US or anyone else. They were sold to us by money by tribel warlords who had every reason to lie.
"Harris's point is that what the moderate disregards is somewhat arbitrary."
While true, this point is not exactly new nor is it some powerful blow against moderates that has no possible reply. Heck, many NON moderates: many near fundamentalists believe in a sort of "bible is not enough" view in which prayer and inspiration from God override Biblical commands, which people may not properly understand. And many moderates believe that the Bible is imperfect: that the Torah is not really God's laws or opinions directly, but part of a developing tradition of stories that all fall into an attempt to understand God.
"Well actually, Harris argues for an end to Faith period. No faith. One of the major points of his book is that faith is dangerous and debilitating in many ways."
I agree with this idea. Indeed, I'm an atheist. But I'm also a realist, and I don't think this argument is really all that strong, or that everyone will accept that all faith is bad. Some people think that THEIR particular faith is good. And frankly, by and large they seem right: it isn't bad. Harris makes a case that fundamentalists are the "real deal" when it comes to religion, and moderates are just imperfect or would be atheists who can't give up something that's fundamentally bad. I disagree.
"Yes, fuzzy things and things that could be gotten without faith."
To a certain degree, I don't argee. Moral values have no objective basis that could convince all comers. Either you believe that something is wrong, REALLY is wrong, or you don't. It's not the same sort of faith as faith that the earth is 6000 years old, but I don't see how anyone can think that "rape is wrong" is something one can rationally prove, as opposed to just feeling or believing. I'm not saying that faith in a GOD is necessary to believe those things, just that given that morality is pretty hard to justify, I'm not prepared to rule anything out as one way to get there either.
"This wouldn't be so bad in it's self, except that Harris makes some more arguments that I don't want to spoil."
Why not spoil them? I've read the book, you've mostly read it, so we might as well discuss them.
I have read it. I bought it when it first came out. I believe I even saw him give a talk at the Center for Inquiry. But I disagree with him. What you just said has almost nothing to do with what I said. I said that it is legitimate to be a theist and not read the Bible literally: to even think that it is grossly imperfect and misguided at times. What you said was that it is not necessary to believe to have good values. I completely agree. And I never said anything against that idea! I just think that the idea that theists who are not fundamentalists are "bad theists" is flawed.
Well of course, and I think any reader of my post would see that I meant that theists would accepted those things COULD have a via theology that even atheists could find little factual complaint in (other than that they don't believe it)
"As an atheist, I find many of the acts of the god described in the Old Testament to be repugnant and immoral."
But many theists do as well. That's why they think that the Bible is man's imperfect record of an imperfect and confused, but improving, experience with god.
In this case though, its just the opposite. These kids are being told not to believe what evidence says unless it says what they want to hear and that unless they see something with their eyes then it's lies (i.e. trust your desires and own potentially faliable personal experience INSTEAD of direct physical evidence).
In fact, Kenneth Miller has advanced a very plausible religious view in his book "Finding Darwin's God" that reconciles the two. It's based on several ideas:
1) If God knows all causality, then he could have brought about everything into being originally AND have it, from science's view BE random and undetermined. The two are not mutally exclusive when God is the best pool player of all time, setting up the most elaborate shot of all time.
2) God could act via influencing things in ways that, due to quantum outcomes, would indeed be like magic to us, and undetectable or testable (hence we can still believe in a God that does miracles)
3) Evolution itself has plenty of room for a valid new theology based on the idea that God would WANT life to be free of God's direct design. This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain it, it's perfectly plausible.
If the above is true, then both atheists and theists can agree on everything concerning the physical world, without conflict. The atheists certainly wont agree with the faith theology above, but the theists can believe it without having to make any claims that have consequences which rule out the legitimacy of atheism (i.e. the not believing because there is no good evidence kind)
Harris is wrong simply because disregarding large portions of the text or interpreting other parts as metaphorical is perfectly legitimate as a belief system. How can he possibly argue otherwise? Who is he to say on what someone's faith should be built upon? Especially when for most religious moderates, their "faith" is primarily about values and life lessons and human feelings, not dogmas.
Many people don't really know anything about who he was or what he thought or how it applies to modern biology.
The guy was:
1) A careful and thoughtful scientist who spent countless hours studying tihngs most people would find incrediby boring. Darwin spent EIGHT YEARS studying BARNACLES.
2) Fairly shy.
3) A Christian for most of his life, and only an agnostic in later life (which had more to do historically with death in the family than with evolution, just ike Lincoln's rediscovering of Christianity)
The guy is/was NOT:
1) a guy who's ideas are a dogma. What Darwin thought is historically important in the development of evolution, but has no bearing on what and where that theory will lead.
2) 100% right about a LOT of things. He not only got the patterns of heredity completely wrong (he thought it was analog: by trait blending, when it was really digital), but was embarassingly forced to admit it when people with better arguments pointed out that blending was in contradiction with the evidence.
3) Someone that thought fossils had proved his case. To Darwin, fossils showed mainly the fact that past life was very different from present life: hence that most of species that existed in the past no longer existed in his day. This was one of the chief inspirations for his idea. The current creationist obsession with fossils overlooks the fact that Darwin put forward his theory, and was considered to be correct, long before we had anything like the fantastically rich fossil record of today. Darwin predicted that future fossils would all confirm his theory, but he NEVER expected that we'd find anywhere as many as we have, or that an entirely unimaginable field (genetics) would someday come to exist and provide an indepedent second check on the fossil record, allowing us to figure out actual lineages.
Darwin also didn't propose that the origins of life were part of evolution. The most he ever said on the subject was that maybe life had started in some warm little pool somewhere... in a private letter. He didn't publish this idea as scientific work.
There are so many misconceptions about the man that this otherwise fairly reserved guy is just buried under layers of legend. He was neither an exceptional genius and phropet, nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist. He was a bright, studious man who worked hard, amassed tons of evidence, and hit upon a stunningly innovative realization about how evolution could have occured (one which was as much due to the new discoveries in geology and biology of his time as to his own thinking: as is obvious from the fact that no one in the history of earth had thought of it before... and then suddenly two guys did indepedently around the same time). He's worth remembering and learning about, not worshiping or demonizing.
You are acting like there is some sort of binary: either they know for certain, or its just a guess. This is nonsense. Some things are known to a very high degree of certainty, because multiple lines of evidence all converge. Sometimes things are less well supported... and people generally say so.
"In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate."
Uhhhh.... bull. Discarding fossils because there is no way they can be so old? DARWIN? Kiddo, there wasn't even a well developed idea about the age of the earth when Darwin was around, much less a sense of the complete collumn. Methinks you got this story a bit mixed up.
"Lots of things have evolved more than once (wings is probably the most typical example)."
Well, that's not quite true. Things with similar general functions have evolved twice (convergent evolution) but they are always morphologically different, since evolving the thing the same way twice just isn't even remotely likely.
Uh, but there are feathered dinosaurs. The question here is whether there are feathers on THIS particular class of dinosaur, which there doesn't seem to be any direct evidence of yet, and the original submitter of the story added.
But there are, in fact, several dinosaurs that have feathers.
"D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? "
No, but then popular artists aren't scientists, they are journalists.
"Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said." Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did."
You're confused. The reasoning here is that evolution works only forwards: descent with modification. So if the group from which T-rexes and birds came from had feathers, and birds have feathers, then T-rexes either T-rexes lost their feathers somehow, or the feathered dino is not actually directly related to the T-rex though it is an ancestor of birds (since features are very very unlikely to evolve more than once in the same way, with the same morphology). So the logic is actually a lot stronger than you let on. Of course, I dunno if some of the feathered dinos are actually thought to be directly ancestral to T-rexes, but that's the basic logic, and it's quite sound.
The same logic undergirds the prediction that if birds have a currently unique tissue type, and they are descended from dinos, then its quite likely that dinos had the same tissue type or a similar precusor that doesn't exist in other lines of descent. And, in fact, they do! A T-rex bone of high enough quality to distinguish tissue types was found, and it had a tissue type previously unique to birds in the animal kingdom.
So the expectation really isn't all that crazy.
"One of, if not THE central claim of evolution is that the more complex life-forms evolved from the simpler ones."
Indeed.
"Taking two creatures from the same grouping of complexity and making a hybrid of similar complexity does NOT prove that central tenet."
It proves a key component of the idea: that as species diverge from each other genetically and morphologicaly, they become less and less genetically similar and less and less genetically compatible. If evolution is true, then we should be able to find species that have diverged from a common ancestor, but can still hybridize. And we can. The underlying genetics are, in fact, not even really a mystery. We can see how lines diverge and steadily become too different to be compatible. Human and chimpanzee genomes, for instance, are different ona gross scale mostly only in that one of our chromosomes is version that is fused together from two of what they have. The tell-tale telomere ends are even sitting in the middle of that chromosome, evidence of the past.
"A donkey and a horse are both about equally complex and I suspect so are the dolphin and the killer whale example."
This idea of "equally complex" doesn't actually mean anything. All these different species have different genomes.
"Evolutionists claim for example, that birds evolved from reptiles. A valid experimental proof of this idea would be to make some kind of bird from two reptiles."
No, you are still confused as to what we are experimenting ON. We do experiments on the evidence to see if it shows what it seems to: that birds indeed are historically offshoots of the dinosaurs. If that is true, then we should be able to find fossils that hve features unique to dinosaurs and modern birds. And that's exactly what we found. And this theory is constantly confirmed whenever we turn up new evidence. For instance, when we finally found a remnant of a T-rex with high enough quality to see something about tissue types, we found that T-rexes have a tissue type in their bones that currently only modern birds have.
Asking for science to "reproduce" the entire ancestry of dinosaurs to birds is insane. It took trillions of individuals (along with countless species) across the entire globe over millions of years for that to happen. What scientists look for is evidence of this process having happened: if birds evolved from dinosaurs via reproduction there are all sorts of things which MUST be found in the physical evidence if it is true.
We no more need to reproduce the entire history of all life in the lab than we need to reproduce Thomas Jefferson sleeping with Sally Hemmings to demonstrate that it happened. The evidence of his change is found in the physical evidence that tells that a history, including the record left in genomes. The experiments are done on that evidence, and to produce and discover that evidence as well as to work out what the mechanism was.
"A simpler experiment with two very different single celled creatures would certainly also prove the possibility of making a more complex creature from one or more simple ones."
Single-celled creatures, FYI, generally do not reproduce sexually. They evolve directly, via mutation.
In this respect, we've seen bacteria evolve entirely new metabolic pathways in the lab and all sorts of things that most certainly are increases in functional complexity.
"Even taking a relatively small collection of the same type of cells, say amoebas and fashioning a new self reproducing organism from them would certainly prove that this claim of evolution is a fact. The claim that the complex arises from the simple has never been tested by experiment."
Not only has evolution been shown, in a lab, to increase complexity and add new features, but we have a rich history of evidence that it has done so in the case of all life on earth.
You should also probably be aware that evolution happens to large populations over time, not individuals. It isn't a matter of two creatu
"Living things are much more diverse than manmade devices, but nevertheless have many common design features."
Common design features are not at all demanded by design (since design demands nothing in particular at all: that's why it's useless as an explanation), but they are absolutely demanded by common descent. And not just similarities: a very very specific pattern of similarities.
"The underlying chemistry of life with its DNA codes is a tried and true design, just as 4 wheels are in an automobile."
The problem is that the underlying genetics goes even farther than that. The similarities in life can be grouped into relations that extend beyond even the functional parts: even the non-coding areas bear distinct features that can be grouped into a family tree that in turn makes sense as a timeline and is confirmed by every different way of looking at it. There is nothing necessary about having the exact same number of hair follicles as apes, nor is there something special about the exact design of our molars. But if evolution is true, then these sorts of similarities are absolutely required. They HAVE to fit all the rest of the evidence in the same way that everything says they should.
One of the most interesting are atavisms. These are when supressed aspects of your ancestor's genetic code accidentaly get expressed. The result is humans with tails, whales with legs, and so on: all betraying their past ancestry.
"The very nature of bio-identification, such as fingerprints, iris scans and the blood vessels in the palm of your hands depend on the uniqueness of each individual."
Yes. Though, of course, fingerprints are a fairly recent development in the history of life. It's also a key requirement of evolution via natural selection that there be a wide range of variation to choose from. And as you have conceded, there is.
"The structure of hemoglobin is similar in all mammals."
Indeed it is. But it's also slightly different across mammals. And the differences all fit into a specific pattern of relation via modification. The mammals who are most distantly related to us, as shown by fossil records, happen to have hemoglobin sequences which are less like ours than any other mammals. And so on. All mammals can be fit into a family tree that when arranged in the way that the genes and fossils suggest, show clear lines of descent with modification along the way.
"Physiologically, you (and I) are much more similar in many ways to a pig than any ape."
I'm afraid that is flat out false. You may have been confused by the fact that we use pigs for human-hybrid experiments. But this is because pigs are much cheaper and easier to keep, and they breed faster, and so on, than apes. There is only one major NEW morphological feature that humans have that othre apes don't: the indentation at the roof of your mouth, allowing you to make sophisticated sounds of language that other apes cannot.
"Similarities of design in no way proves descent. Living things are both similar in many ways, yet all individually different."
And it is the _specific_ patterns of similarities and differences that demonstrate common descent. Just as you are genetically most like your parents, and less so your grandparents, so are humans genetically most like chimps, and less so gibbons. Lo and behold, this is the exact pattern and timeline that the fossil record shows. The genetic record matches the fossil record (which would be totally inconcievably by mere chance) and both match all other observed facts about the history of life on earth.
"My main contention is that true science requires EXPERIMENTATION to prove a theory. Before experimental science was born, philosophers had all sorts of theories about the world we live in. Most of them were disproved by experiments, often at great cost, to the early brave souls who went against the prevailing wisdom."
Indeed. And evolutionary science is chock full of experimentation. Why were you under the impr
It's interesting that you brought up the example of cars, because of course cars do not and cannot be made to fit into a tree of descent with modification like living things. With cars, features and traits can spread across lineages without any regard to time and space connections being necessary between models. That's the sort of thing that designers do. And that's completely absent, in every regard, from biological life.
In biological life, we end up with patterns that are necessarily linked in both time and space, with groups of traits that radiate and descend forwards in time, never laterally (like what happens all the time with designed cars).
"If any thing this tends to show that whoever DESIGNED the ape used some similar components for you and me to accomplish the task of chewing food."
Since if the parts were different, you'd just say that the designer was being creative, this sentance is nothing more than ad hoc. It doesn't show anything, because it risks nothing.
On the other hand, if an ape like a human being had feathers: something that it would be child's play for a designer to do, then evolution would clearly be proven false. And yet we never see anything like that happening.
"Human designers do that all the time -- re-use operational components for similar purposes."
Really. They just happened to pick the exact same number of hair follicles for you as they did when they "designed" an ape. They happened to pick the exact same particularlistic shape of of molar: a type of molar that arose only once, and only appears in creatures after it first arose in apes, and then only in apes. And they, in fact, made humans simply by slightly modifying the traits of a basal ape... but never in any way that would make any description that sets apes apart from all other monkeys and primates and mammals not then also apply to human beings. And of course, this designer arranged all of this not just so that there would be a morphological tree of features, but so that the genetic code, even the non-coding parts, would demonstrate exactly the same line of descent in exactly the same way that paternity tests can tell you who you are related to.
Riiiiight.
This article, in a word, is bunk. The claims this guy is making are goofy and demonstrably misinformed about what evolutionary theory is.
Some basic background:
Punk eek was opposed to phyletic uniformatism/gradualism (which many consider to have been a cheap straw man anyway). This was a debate over macroevolutionary history: the patterns of large scale morphological and species change. Contrary to popular opinion, macroevolutionary change is subject to all sorts of different forces: things like large scale, genetic drift, extinction events, and so on. No biologist claims that natural selection is the only factor in the particular history of life on earth.
This guy is is not talking about things on the scale of punk eek. He's talking about things on the scale of microevolution, and what he's proposing seems to be a form of saltationism. At best, he's attacking a purported gradualism in actual mutation rates (which itself is nonsense: it's mainstream genetics that different species have all sorts of different mutation rates as well as different rates of morphological change). But for all the rhetoric, nothing he says that's actually correct is even slightly revolutionary. At best, he's proposing another mechanism for variation: variation that involves "good tricks" in a certain genomic sequence that environmental stressors can make happen in many different individuals at once. But variation of ANY sort still just provides the raw material for natural selection to work on. And without natural selection at work, mutation would still be just ultimately random garbage. It's only by placing mutations through the sieve of actually being expressed in individuals that any information about the environment can be imprinted onto a given gene pool. That's the only way we know of that random jostling can be transformed into functional movement. For the mutations to somehow "predict" or "will themselves" to happen in certain linked ways that have a non-random purpose requires some other mechanism, and this guy proposes nothing.
And that's me being the most charitable. Most of the rest of what the guy says is just total nonsense. For instance, he implies that cellular repair systems resist mutation (heck, he even speaks about whether they "willingly" resist change or not!). Well... yes. But they fail. All the time. Most everyone reading this has recent and unique several mutations, right now. And that's not even to mention that you'd have to be grossly misinformed about Darwin to think that "Darwins theory" says ANYTHING about genetic mutation. Darwin hadn't a clue what genes or DNA or the rest of it even were! All he spoke about was the differential success of different variations. Of course, what Darwin thought is irrelevant trivia to what is true in biology, but still, this guy is just showing both his ignorance and his obsession with the idea that Darwin is some sort of "high priest" whom he is fighting against.
Now consider this: "according to Schwartz, mutations occur recessively and are passed unknowingly until the mutation saturates the population. Then, when members of the population receive two copies of the mutation, the trait appears suddenly."
Either the reporter got this wrong, or this guy is really misinformed. Mutations can be recessive or dominant. Nothing about them makes them occur "recessively" only. While the scenario he describes can and does happen (recessive traits that don't really start appearing in force in a population until they become near fixed), nothing about it is particularly revolutionary. And something with complex functionality and specification like fully formed "teeth" is not going to evolve completely out of sight, unexpressed, and then burst onto the scene all at once. That, kids, is called saltation, and while big saltationist jumps can certainly happen (and can spring out via the recessive/dominant pathway), they are very very very unlikely to ever hit upon something functional and useful. Remember: only the actual testing
"Neither of the above can be "proved", but you may believe one or the other. "
Common descent is proven, sorry. If you are not an ape, descended from other apes, then what are ape molars doing in your mouth? How come you have exactly the same number of hair folicles as an ape? Why do you have the same sort of rotational shoulder that is unique to apes? And so on. You can't escape placing humanity, as well as every other creature, into a single tree of descent. The evidence converges from so many different lines of independent proof that it's simply unavoidable.
Well, and more conventionally, bacteria don't have the same sorts of repair mechanisms to stop errors.
"I know plenty of people (especially on Slashdot) who still believe the old "millions of years of small gradual changes" bit."
There's nothing substantially wrong with that statement at all, as long as no one thinks that "gradual" means "evenly paced morphologic change." In terms of actual adaptive change, evolution is still the accumulation of small changes no matter how you slice it. There are certainly some seemingly major jumps, but these are in fact themselves fairly simple in terms of the complexity of the underlying genetics.
Read the quotes from the guy. It looks like he's the one going gonzo: all these quotes about "dogmatism" and "I've disproved Darwin bwahahaha!"
At best, what he describes is one of MANY known engines of variation in genomes. The idea that discovering a mechanism of increased variation is a challenge to the idea of natural selection is utterly absurd. This really sounds like the case of a US crackpot who is hyping beyond recognition the otherwise perfectly mainstream work of an Italian scientist.
"Whereas Darwin said that species tend to change gradually overtime, Stephen Gould argued that species are static for long periods of time (equilbrium) until something dramatic happens (the punctuation). He argued that species evolve relatively quickly during events like ice ages, famines, massive volcanoes, meteor strikes."
As many people have pointed out, Gould overplayed his hand on this. Darwin's "gradualism" was essentially borrowed from geology: it was in contrast to catastrophism. But it doesn't necessarily imply steady, even speed change. THAT idea, known as phyletic gradualism, was popular in the early 20th century, and it is THAT which scientists now agree is bogus.
"P.E. is the only theory (that I know of) that adequately explains why for billions of years life was single celled and simple."
If this is what people are saying about PE, then they are being very deceptive. Life was indeed single celled for a long time, but there's no special reason to think that this is troubling, and it certainly doesn't mean that it was simple. The basic mechanisms of cells are no small matter at all, and a HUGE a part of our genome is spent on defining these sorts of functions. In some sense, all the supposed more complex features are just afterthought and minor additions, at least in terms of the genome. Multicellularity may seem important to us, but to a genome, it's just another trait, and there's no inevitability about it.
"Then, during the Precambrian Explosion some 500 million years ago, life exploded into every form of multicellular life seen today."
The PREcambrian explosion?! It was the Cambrian explosion that got people all worked up (the PreCambrian is basically everything prior to the Cambrian). But it hasn't really panned out quite as billed, and most of what people think about it is grossly misleading. In addition to finding plenty of precambrian precusors at this point, most people think that the major innovation of the Cambrian era was hard parts: things that fossilize easily.
"During those few million years every phyla in existence today came onto the scene."
Well... not really, and the significance one takes from this is probably based on being misinformed about the taxonomic system. Every living thing at ANY period HAS to have had ancestors in the past. The more distant of these ancestors have higher level taxonomic classifications because thats how taxonomy works: species build out the bottom of the tree, off the tips of the branches.
It looks like the mess Gould made of educating people about biology is alive and well.
If thats all they are saying, then what is all this stuff about "challenging evolution" or dogmatism and all this other nonsense. At most, this guy is presenting a new mechanism for variation wherein certain "good trick" stressors cause similar mutations in certain circumstances. Frankly, sounds pretty implausible to me, but even if it were true, I don't see how we get from there to "indoctrination" and al this othre nonsense. This guy sounds like a bit of a crackpot as far as his rhetoric goes.