TS: Creationism vs. Evolution

You weren't taught that the creation actually *happened, right?

markelby OTM though.

x-post

myriad or prodigious

trying to copy it off the book without looking at the keyboard.

I've interviewed this guy a couple of times. He's one of the few creationists with an actual science degree -- Harvard, no less; he studied with Steven Jay Gould -- and I find his attempts to honestly reconcile his beliefs with his scientific methods really interesting. If also bizarre and ultimately kind of sad.

Creationism is total bunk, don't swallow it. As for the arument that it's good to teach alternative theories to evolution, there are such alternatives (eg Lamarkian evolution), but creationism isn't one of them.

It is intrinsically unproveable, like all bad theories. It's a powerplay by extreme elements of the US Church. It's answer to all evidence is, 'God did that'. Well, why God? You might as well say 'The Boogie Man' - or 'Colin Barrow' - or 'Aja'. Invent your all-powerful deity and off you go. Just don't ask what created the all-powerful deity. And don't ask who moved your cheese either.

Evolutionary theory existed and was applied before Darwin for many thousands of years by farmers and animal breeders. Darwin and Wallace came late in the piece and sort of formalised it, spelled it out. Agrarian and farming communities could not have arisen without a basic understanding of genetic inheritance. We wouldn't have domestic dogs or cats, or merino sheep, or tangellos or broccoli! Mmmm broccoli.

Worse than pig-shit thick creationists = creationists who use long words. I'm really angry right now.

I believe evolution is neccesary for adaptation.

This is an interesting misrepresentation of theism. I can believe in God and Creationism (which of course I said I don't) without believing that faith is necessary to divine revelation. I think people should avoid close-minded certainty around children, rather than an open exploration of the way people view their lives.

Free will/determinism is a rotten example of something similar. The debate there is worthwhile because there is scientific evidence for both sides, and it is not beyond imagining its provability or otherwise. Evolution/creationism is a debate between science and fairy tale.

Also, a big problem with the debate about creationism is that people are assuming that people who believe in creationism are stupid and ignorant - they are not. Also the whole "and someone else just made up the other one" (ie creationism) thing is probably nonsense - people developed a religious sense and a religious culture because they believed in the things they were discussing, rather than just going out and lying to their tribes. There is a big difference between being wrong about something and 'making it up' - it was believed for good reason. Our ancestors, and our felow humans who are still theists, believed in God on the basis of rational evidence(and probably misunderstood evidence) - the existance and nature of the world, mankind's consciousness, etc. They took evidence and put a theory to explain it. Now, you may feel that theory was wrong, but they were not stupid. It really doesn't aid any debate to ridicule the other's point of view and call their (totally rational) beliefs a fairytale. (there is nothing irrational about religious faith - people have looked for a long time and have found no terminal paradoxes or inconsistancies in them).

Probability doesn't really help us either. If we are talking about probability, is the scientific or the religious one more probable? I don't think either is more probable, because in each everything is assumed; I mean Occam's razor would say the one that involves the fewest assumptions - well they both argue about the first cause, only the nature is different. The assumption of a God may seem unlikely to you, but a person who feels a personal spiritual relationship with God feels it is not only more likely he exists, but certain.

And we still have no widely accepted and understood explanation for the origins of the universe within the scientific viewpoint. Also, I don't think the free-will\determinism debate is a scientific one, but a philosophical one, and I can't think of any discovery or advance that would prove either.

did the neanderthals believe in him? do dogs and cats believe in him?

what do crows call your jehovah? or does the supposed creator of the universe only exist to humour humans on a planet called earth.

fairly clear that i'm with science on this one.

the line that god doesn't appear because it would ruin faith for everyone is just plain disappointing. faith is not the same thing as believing that something imaginary exists. faith is hope and belief in something real.

i have faith in jermaine defoe. i don't have any faith in a big beard in the sky.

The problem with fantasy theories like creationism, animism etc, is that, in principle, nothing could ever be observed that would prove them wrong. This is their weakness not their strength. They exclude any reality or truth test. This is always the problem with delusional beliefs.

Fantasy theories are characterised by a lack of practical application. One simply can't utilise them to make anything. Creationism is in this category, as is most alchemy.

What bugs me about the creationist theory is that its adherents all seem like this one big cumulative gestalt of one of those people who can't stand to lose an argument, no matter what. They wouldn't sacrifice one bit of their faith and it wouldn't disprove one bit of God's existence if they just said, "yes, until we see more evidence to the contrary, it's likely that the way God created life was through evolution." But no, they have to make sure the other side loses the argument at all costs!

By the way, for the record, not all Catholic schools teach creationism - I was taught only evolution.

Richard Dawkins is one of the main reasons creationism has thrived well for the past few decades in spite of the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution.

That's odd, because in my experience they completely fail to answer questions.

'God created everything!! Evolutionary theory is bunkum!!'
'And you can prove this how exactly?'
'...hey look, it's raining'

oh yeah ... i'm on the side of evolution.

fundamental judeo-christian beliefs pale in comparison, really.

Sometimes they do. Other just bang on literally about the seven-day thing.

no. fucking. way. THAT IS SO AWESOME

NO being barked out of a triceratops skull is soooooo classic

Evolution in action:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7840404.stm

I'm sure there have been other well-documented cases of evolution being observed in the wild, but this is the first one I've heard of.

So while they may be the butt of many jokes, it would be foolish to pooh-pooh their talents.

FUCK YOUUUUUU

lol

i don't know where else to link this to, but this an interesting article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/views/20essa.html?_r=2

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Maybe our woes arise because our Stone Age genes are thrust into Space Age life. That beer gut? It comes from eating too many processed carbohydrates; our bodies evolved to eat only unrefined foods, mainly meat, and we get out of kilter veering from our ancestral diet.

Food allergies and digestive woes? We, like other mammals, aren’t meant to consume dairy products after weaning. When politicians fall from grace after committing adultery, some commentator will always point out that such behavior has evolutionary roots: weren’t the best procreators alpha males with roving eyes?

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called “paleofantasies.” She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance.

As an evolutionary biologist, I was filled with enthusiasm at first over the idea of a modern mismatch between everyday life and our evolutionary past. But a closer look reveals that not all evolutionary ideas are created equal; even for Darwinians, the devil is in the details. The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.

First, when exactly was this age of harmony, and what was it like? Scavenging, or eating the carcasses of dead animals left by (or stolen from) predators like lions, was probably replaced by active hunting and accumulation of wild plants about 55,000 years ago, and agriculture seems to have begun a mere 10,000 years ago. We did a lot of different things during each of these times.

How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?

But the difficulty with using our hunter-gatherer selves as icons of well-being goes much deeper. It is not as if we finally achieved harmony with our environment during the Pleistocene, heaved a sigh of relief and stopped.

Instead, evolution lurches along, with successive generations sometimes unchanged, sometimes better suited to their surroundings in some ways but not others. At any one point, adaptations take place: individuals who can endure heat or cold or famine leave more offspring than their less hardy counterparts. But there is no one point when one can say, “Voilà! Finished.”

Did our cave-dwelling forebears feel nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal? Were hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from a lion was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: after all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.

You might argue that hunter-gatherers were better adapted to their environment simply because they spent many thousands of years at it — much longer than we’ve spent sitting in front of a computer or eating Mars bars. That’s true for some attributes, but not all. Evolution isn’t the creaky old process we used to think it was. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that the rate of evolution can be fast (sometimes blindingly so) or slow, or anything in between.

Take dairy products, one of the classic modern foods we supposedly aren’t meant to eat. Most people who can’t tolerate them lack a gene that confers the ability to break down lactose, the sugar in milk, after the age of weaning. Our Stone Age ancestors couldn’t digest milk as adults either, but a recent study shows that about 5,000 years ago, mutations that keep that gene switched on spread throughout Northern Europe. That’s also when cattle began to be domesticated; being able to drink milk as well as lower-lactose cheese would have been advantageous as a source of nutrition and fluids.

Interestingly, lactose tolerance is also found in some African populations; the mutations for it are different from the ones found in Europeans, but the results are the same. This major change in diet — and genes — happened within an evolutionary blink of an eye.

We have never been a seamless match with the environment. Instead, our adaptation is more like a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart. The paleontologist Neal Shubin points out that our inner fish constrains the human body’s performance and health, because adaptations that arose in one environment bedevil us in another. Hiccups, hernias and hemorrhoids are all caused by an imperfect transfer of anatomical technology from our fish ancestors.

This isn’t to say that we wouldn’t be better off eating fewer processed foods. And certainly we have health concerns that never struck our ancestors. But we shouldn’t flagellate ourselves for having modern bodies, and we shouldn’t assume that tweaking our diets or our posture will rescue us from all our current ills. That’s just a paleofantasy about the future.

Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “Riddled with Life.”

Here's a rather long and technical piece on observed instances of speciation. The reason creationists don't believe in speciation is that they expect a chicken to transform into a chimpanzee before our very eyes. Unfortunately the only instances we humans are likely to observe in our lifetimes are on the order of plants, fruit-flies, and bacteria.

LOL at "Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular . . ."

Budget
$105,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend
$35,867,488 (USA) (9 March 2008) (3,410 Screens)
Gross
$94,770,548 (USA) (15 June 2008)

really interesting article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

last night I watched a show on this exact subject on pbs

they used the same Swedish story too

if the article is right then by posting on ilx you're guaranteeing your children are going to end up as shut-in aspie weirdoes

I sorta wish that I still didn't know that eating junk food / living poorly is gonna give my grandkids cancer!

It would be an interesting article if it didn't feel the need to equate 'it's more complicated than we previously thought' with 'omg Darwin ur dumm!!!' I realise that he only uses this to get a hook into the reader with controversial talking-points (and then BIG REVEAL at the end - maybe Darwin wasn't so dumb after all!), but it makes it impossible to take him seriously.

For instance: What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Anyone who knows even one iota knows that the scientific consensus is NOT 'Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school'.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection.

Most of these stories were financed by companies attempting to promote a product by news coverage (see also: most miserable day of the year). The fact that they were ever taken seriously is the fault of writers like this.

Referencing Coulter = UH

Also, Fodor appears to be either inserting a straw-man semantic interpretation or making a wild logical leap in his argument, but I'm not sure whether to blame him or Burkeman, here.

So yeah, interesting research but terrible article.

yeah really didn't understand wtf that coulter quotation was there for

It would be an interesting article if it didn't feel the need to equate 'it's more complicated than we previously thought' with 'omg Darwin ur dumm!!!' I realise that he only uses this to get a hook into the reader with controversial talking-points (and then BIG REVEAL at the end - maybe Darwin wasn't so dumb after all!), but it makes it impossible to take him seriously.

^
seriously.

re the Coulter, I'm pretty sure there have been takes on evolution since at least the early part of the 20th century (and since it is v. far from my area of expertise, probably much farther back) that have focussed on how survival of the fittest isn't a useful way to think of it, because in reality through lots of chance happenings (i.e. natural disasters, living somewhere with unusually abundant food supplies and no predators - it really is in a large way just a matter of who happens to not end up dead) lots of weird, not particularly 'fit' mechanisms survive and that's where the interesting things happen and peculiar things come into being. So (shi that was a long sentence) to give it any credit as a criticism seems kinda crazy to me.

I'm staggered that newspaper journalists can't understand evolutionary theory tbh

hate the game, not the player

can we go back to talking about how eating big macs may make your grandkids fat

or worse!

Nah sorry obviously those dudes are qualified to talk about the world outside their own crippling alcoholic haze

anyway I want my kids to be race car drivers, so I've resolved to always drive above the speed limit, also to save up money and buy a japanese sports car

I would rather schools teach students that we were all formed from magic LEGOs than teach creationism

I'd rather they teach creationism but giggle throughout

it's fine to teach creationism imo, but only on the morning of April 1st.

There shd be space to teach Creationism in the context of some kind of Philosophy of Science/Epistemology course, which ought to be considered as important as yr basic GCSE-level science classes.

ah yer bugger, I'd just written the same thing but less succinctly

Have been reading about Fodor's thesis + book in philosophy and science blogs for months now. I still don't understand his basic point and the overwhelming consensus on both sides is that he's an idiot.

I've always been of the opinion that there must be some measure of genetic passing-down of what are perhaps non physical traits. Look at how cats know how to clean themselves maybe. Instinct stuff, I guess I mean (someone will probably correct me and say theyre taught by mummy cat).

Anyway - it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that behaviours and other mental traits aren't passed along genetically! But then I get into the idea of the collective unconcious and everyone's gonna glaze over, so.

PS I didnt go to college.

some of that, like cats cleaning, might be acquired through play. eg, if a newborn baby was left alone in a house for 10 years ( being fed, cleaned etc by a robot ) would it learn to use a computer, a tv, to play ball or strum a guitar, assuming these items were available?

(nb this is a thought experiment, please do not try it at home)

no. it would be a fucked up feral child.

almost like a welcome-home present, i arrive in knoxville just in time for an attempted book-banning:

http://www.metropulse.com/news/2010/apr/08/ban-science-book-school-board-delays-action/

(certainly can make a case that the use of the word "myth" here is almost deliberately provocative, but it's also sort of comical to me how flimsy people must think their children's faith is if it can be shaken by seeing one word on one page of a textbook. also, christians in the bible belt playing persecuted and using civil-rights language -- bias, intolerance, discrimination -- is always good entertainment.)

and now it's on fox news. (or at least, the complaining dad is. nobody from the school system or anyone else. of course.)

yup this might get fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgZUV-_S5zM

This is the fellow who's book, snappily titled 'The Origin Of Species Nonsense' was going to be launched by the Irish science minister before someone told him it might look a bit...you know...mad.

Comedy Gold.

oh, you can laugh about it.

our minister for science is the brother of our minister for finance, FYI. they apparently share a grá mór for outlandish and ridiculous theories

Well, I was going to post it to the Irish politics thread...

it's there already, don't worry :)

Ha! Well if you can't laugh at yourself who can you...etc.

it's all a bit irish

South Korea surrenders to creationist demands

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science.

A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. “The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge,” says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.

The campaign was led by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which aims to delete the “error” of evolution from textbooks to “correct” students’ views of the world, according to the society’s website. The society says that its members include professors of biology and high-school science teachers.

The STR is also campaigning to remove content about “the evolution of humans” and “the adaptation of finch beaks based on habitat and mode of sustenance”, a reference to one of the most famous observations in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. To back its campaign, the group highlights recent discoveries that Archaeopteryx is one of many feathered dinosaurs, and not necessarily an ancestor of all birds2. Exploiting such debates over the lineage of species “is a typical strategy of creation scientists to attack the teaching of evolution itself”, says Joonghwan Jeon, an evolutionary psychologist at Kyung Hee University in Yongin.

ffs, harry anderson, why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ6bUfOVf1g

Should be worth the watch if only for laughs.

WHO WILL WIN THE BIG DEBATE?

The winners will be the people who ignore this completely.

Everyone else is a loser. That includes people watching it/blogging about it for laughs/ironically.

Well then we've all already lost but the melodramatic bathos of the trailer music plus the hokey, adds up to blue kryptonite for me.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/elephants-africa-tusks-ivory-poaching-born-without-a7440706.html

Punctuated equilibrium comin' at you in the Anthropocene

https://aeon.co/essays/on-epigenetics-we-need-both-darwin-s-and-lamarck-s-theories

epigenetic information transfer sounds like stochastic resonance for your phenotype