Posted on 01/20/2002 12:07:19 PM PST by PatrickHenry
In one of the most existentially penetrating statements ever made by a scientist, Richard Dawkins concluded that "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Facing such a reality, perhaps we should not be surprised at the results of a 2001 Gallup poll confirming that 45 percent of Americans believe "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so"; 37 percent prefer a blended belief that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process"; and a paltry 12 percent accept the standard scientific theory that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process."
In a forced binary choice between the "theory of creationism" and the "theory of evolution," 57 percent chose creationism against only 33 percent for evolution (10 percent said that they were "unsure"). One explanation for these findings can be seen in additional results showing that just 34 percent considered themselves to be "very informed" about evolution.
Although such findings are disturbing, truth in science is not determined democratically. It does not matter what percentage of the public believes a theory. It must stand or fall on the evidence, and there are few theories in science that are more robust than the theory of evolution. The preponderance of evidence from numerous converging lines of inquiry (geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, genetics, biogeography, and so on) points to the same conclusion--evolution is real. The 19th-century philosopher of science William Whewell called this process of independent lines of inquiry converging together to a conclusion a "consilience of inductions." I call it a "convergence of evidence." Whatever you call it, it is how historical events are proved.
The reason we are experiencing this peculiarly American phenomenon of evolution denial (the doppelgnäger of Holocaust denial, using the same techniques of rhetoric and debate) is that a small but vocal minority of religious fundamentalists misread the theory of evolution as a challenge to their deeply held religious convictions. Given this misunderstanding, their response is to attack the theory. It is no coincidence that most evolution deniers are Christians who believe that if God did not personally create life, then they have no basis for belief, morality and the meaning of life. Clearly for some, much is at stake in the findings of science.
Because the Constitution prohibits public schools from promoting any brand of religion, this has led to the oxymoronic movement known as "creation science" or, in its more recent incarnation, "intelligent design" (ID). ID (aka God) miraculously intervenes just in the places where science has yet to offer a comprehensive explanation for a particular phenomenon. (ID used to control the weather, but now that we understand it, He has moved on to more difficult problems, such as the origins of DNA and cellular life. Once these problems are mastered, then ID will no doubt find even more intractable conundrums.) Thus, IDers would have us teach children nonthreatening theories of science, but when it comes to the origins of life and certain aspects of evolution, children are to learn that "ID did it." I fail to see how this is science--or what, exactly, ID-ers hope will be taught in these public schools. "ID did it" makes for a rather short semester.
To counter the nefarious influence of the ID creationists, we need to employ a proactive strategy of science education and evolution explanation. It is not enough to argue that creationism is wrong; we must also show that evolution is right. The theory's founder, Charles Darwin, knew this when he reflected: "It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."
Michael Shermer [the author] is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Borderlands of Science.
I can respect the sentiment, but Mr. Robinson is simply wrong if he figures the evolution debate to be orthogonal to conservative politics. The idea that there is no god, that we are products of stochastic processes, that survival of the fittest is the only moral law in nature etc. etc. is the basic thing which causes the Lenins, Stalins, and Clintons to exist. Nobody who believes in anything more than that could conceivably conduct themselves in the manner in which Clinton or Ted Kennedy do, or espouse the kinds of political policies they do..Jim Robinson has told me by Freepmail that he regards evolution threads as contrary to FR's mission. I have documentary proof of same.
The Post Topics 'science' and 'evolution' which once existed on FR were deleted long ago. Do you think that might have been a hint?
Robinson may have since decided for any number of reasons to tolerate these threads, but not because he thinks they have anything to do with FR's mission.
For those kinds of reasons, I feel FR readers should understand the basic realities of evolutionism.
The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the voodoo doctors down in Haiti would probably not be interested.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Very kind of you. But I also make deranged posts. The trick is to know the difference.
Did you ever think of the real reason these people are laughed at? The theory of evolution is so strong that papers blatantly challenging the foundations of evolution are usually quite laughable. Now take something like cosmology for instance, one person recently submitted a paper claiming there may be no black holes. This was a serious challenge to cosmology theory as we know it. Because his paper was intelligent and made a lot of good scientific points supporting his idea, it is being quite well received. If someone comes up with something as equally academically valid against evolution, it would have to be accepted also.
Think of it this way. I'd get laughed right out of the house too if I went to a meeting of theologians with a big paper claiming Christ was gay (I've seen these papers, they are stupid).
Upon what evidence do you base your assertion, or is this some sort of WAG based purely upon subjective experience? In other words, is it so because you are incapable of grasping the possibility it happened naturally?
I would love to see where. I haven't seen any good scientific arguments against it. Actually, seeing evolution conclusively proven wrong would be one of the most exciting scientific finds of the last hundred years.
I would respond more, but I grow tired of always repeating the same information. The answers to all of your questions can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org. All of this prattle, misrepresentation and obfuscation contained in a logical argument nightmare is quite well refuted there.
Please pick one of these that you consider to be scientific, and I'll look at it more closely.
Another quite interesting thing that you will notice is that evolution theory simply grew up based on research, and the links show it. Most creationist links are meant to discredit evolution, not to promote their own "science" by producing evidence, only attacking the opposition. Your "science" must be pretty weak if most of what you do is attack the opposition.
Another thing, and this isn't ad hominem, is that these people are always trying to speak from a position of authority, and always show their degree titles. But their degrees are usually either bogus or in a completely unrelated field (there are a few notable exceptions). This includes much of the ICR and other creation organizations. Why is that? Maybe so that people will see the degree and automatically believe them, rather relying on their arguments?
He is already well-known there. The "Ted Holden" links are about medved.
I'll respectfully stand aside and let "Physicist" answer your questions; he's emminently qualified, and I've seen him explain the matter/anti-matter asymmetry before. It is a really interesting topic, and I have every confidence that his answer will not disappoint.
How do you get an internet connection out in the desert?
I'll try to give the "Reader's Digest" simplified answer, as it appears "Physicist" is busy elswhere.
IF matter and its anti-matter counterparts all interact identically, you would expect mutual pair annihilation to have wiped out virtally all the matter and anti-matter in the Universe. Since this clearly is NOT what we observe, it didn't happen.
Andre Sakharov proposed an explanation for this: it involves rapid expansion in the early Universe combined with an a so-called violation of the conservation of certain properties possessed by the particles (charge & parity, for example). This latter requirement amounts to saying that anti-matter particles don't interact with other particles quite the same way their matter counterparts do. This asymmetry between the matter and anti-matter worlds eventually results in anti-matter particles being consumed in particle interactions slighty faster than their matter counterparts are; hence, over time the population of anti-matter particles grows smaller than the matter particles, and the rate of pair annihilations goes down (leaving more matter) while the anti-matter particles continue their slighty faster rate of attrition.
Given sufficient time, which was in no short supply in the early Universe, the density of anti-matter approaches zero, while the density of matter stabilizes at some finite value that we see today.
The details of how all of this could actually work are still being worked out by scientists; it is one of the remaining big questions in Physics and Cosmology.
I'm sure "Physicist" can fill in a more details, and correct whatever mistakes and confusion I have wrought.
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