Posted on 03/22/2012 7:44:32 AM PDT by Moseley
Here is evolution for you:
http://upressonline.com/2012/03/fau-student-threatens-to-kill-professor-and-classmates/ This is very sad. And it seems crazy at first.
BUT THINK ABOUT IT. It is obvious to me what is going on here. Yes, I am guessing / reading between the lines. But I think it is very clear.
The class was being taught about EVOLUTION:
A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.
DID YOU CATCH IT? The professor was discussing the evolutionary role of "attraction between peacocks."
In other words, how do animals / people choose a mate?
If you remember what evolution teaches, it teaches that INDIVIDUALS *MATE* BASED UPON PERCEIVED *SUPERIOR* CHARACTERISTICS for evolution.
So this Black woman Jonatha(?) Carr obviously perceives that BEING BLACK IS ASSUMED (by many) to be INFERIOR and that evolution means that men CHOOSE women based upon what is perceived to be SUPERIOR qualities.
What evolution means to Carr -- and who can blame her, logically? -- is that men are going to choose "BETTER" women than her, and she is not going to get chosen as a valuable person or desirable mate.
Hence, the discussion of how animals, like peacocks, CHOOSE A MATE based upon how they other one LOOKS.
So this Black woman is obviously perceiving that evolution means that men will choose the SUPERIOR candidate for mating and reproduction, and evolution produces "improvement" over time by men selecting SUPERIOR women -- meaning NOT HER.
Whereas Christianity teaches the value and infinite worth of E V E R Y human being in God's eyes, and that every man and woman is not only valuable just for who they are, but infinitely valuable in God's heart, evolution teaches that this Black woman is INFERIOR to other women, to be discarded and rejected in the evolutionary march toward perfection.
Buried in her thinking must be the idea that Black men (so the cliche goes, true or untrue) prefer White women over Black women. (I suspect this flows from Blacks being persecuted and wanting the affirmation of being valued by a perceied more powerful class, not because there is anything inherently superior about White women over Black women in an evolutionary sense.)
God looks over the vast diversity of human types and characteristics, and says IT IS GOOD: ALL OF IT. All of the vast differences and variety. There is no "better" or "worse" in God's eyes. There is no human being more (or less) valuable than this Black woman Carr. Everyone is equally cherished in God's heart.
Somewhere, if we can learn to follow God's plans (which unfortunately is much more difficult and mysterious than it sounds, and can be a frustrating search), God knows the PERFECT CHOICE of a man for Jonatha Carr.
NO, the man isn't perfect, any more than Miss Carr is perfect. No one is perfect. Marriage involves the strange situation of two VERY IMPERFECT human beings trying to live a life together without killing each other. Therein lies the challenge of learning to APPLY God's principles in real life. Marriage is like the "lab class" in comparison with the "class lecture." We get to put into practice during the week what God tries to teach us on Sunday.
But God says that if Miss Carr can put her trust in God's hands, there is a perfect choice of a mate for her. God doesn't move on our time table, and God can be frustrating sometimes. But in God Miss Carr lacks nothing.
However, evolution tells Miss Carr that life is a hostile, adversarial, dog-eat-dog COMPETITION in which she is necessarily going to be the LOSER because (in her mind, as she has been bombarded with negativity) being a Black woman puts her at the bottom of the list of choices.
Evolution means survival of the fittest and (she thinks) that ain't her.
Can you see now why she yells "I HATE EVOLUTION!"
The question is:
DO YOU?
DO YOU HATE EVOLUTION, TOO?
For the very same reason that Miss Carr understandably hates evolution, shouldn't we all?
Evolution is not simply an irrelevant side show for those who believe in God.
EVOLUTION IS A DIRECT AND VIOLENT ASSAULT ON THE WORTH AND DIGNITY AND SELF IDENTITY OF HUMAN BEINGS, TEARING DOWN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THEMSELVES, AND PITTING BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER AND SISTER AGAINST SISTER, IN AN UNGODLY COMPETITION. Evolution breeds violence, hatred, depression, and despair.
There is not a single human being alive whom God does not want. And there is not a single human being alive whom God wants any more than any other.
Yet evolution tells this young Black woman - and any one else who has ever, temporarily, felt inferior for a moment in time -- that she is destined to be discarded by life, that she is trash to be excluded and rejected by the world.
Do you hate evolution with a passion, yet?
Indeed. Thank you for the valuable link, dearest sister in Christ. It shows how science can be abused to come up with "evidence" that supports our presuppositions. A modern example would be anthropogenic global warming. Here evidence has been tampered with, suppressed, or grossly misrepresented in order to fit the conclusion the scientists in question wanted to reach.
Back at the time of the Founding, many if not most Americans did believe that blacks were somehow "inferior." This attitude, of course, pre-dates Darwin's theory by roughly 80 years. But when that theory did emerge, it was used to validate the pre-existing attitude, on the basis of "science," that blacks were "objectively" inferior....
I find it interesting that, at his death, George Washington emancipated all his slaves. When Thomas Jefferson died, he emancipated only five of his slaves — and those he freed are thought to have been his own children by Sally Hemmings. All the rest — including Sally — were not emancipated, but became part of his estate. When Jefferson died, he was massively in debt. I don't know whatever happened to Sally.
The linked article quotes Jefferson: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowment of body and mind.” It seems to me that "suspicion" has never been confirmed; nor I suspect is it confirmable because it just isn't true.
Which only goes to show that even a brilliant mind like Jefferson could be infected by insupportable presuppositions largely informed by prevailing attitudes in the general culture that are fundamentally false.
The point is, Darwinism if anything seemed to justify these insupportable presuppositions, in time giving "intellectual cover" to the goals of the eugenics movement (Galton, Sanger, et al.).
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Thank you so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ, and for the link to Amanda Thompson's illuminating article, "Scientific Racism: The Justification of Slavery and Segregated Education in America."
Just a couple of questions, dear allmendream:
Would that be in a controlled environment — i.e., in a laboratory setting? Is what goes on in a laboratory setting necessarily indicative of what goes on in nature (i.e., in an uncontrolled environment)?
Are you using bacteria — microscopic, single-celled organisms which do not have either a membrane-enclosed nucleus or other membrane-enclosed organelles like mitochondria — as a proxy for all biological systems in nature, in particular of the most highly complex one we know about, human beings?
It appears from what you wrote that the "marching order" signals are all triggered locally. I.e., they are the effects of local causes. For a bacterium, this may be good enuf.
But what happens with the astronomically more complex higher life forms? Do you believe that the behavior of bacteria really sheds light on the organization of these higher life forms? It seems clear to me that such organization can only be accomplished by a non-local cause, one that coordinates and governs the entire system, not just the behavior of the system's components.
In short, assuming you can do as you claim in the above italics — and I really don't doubt this — what relevance does it have for the understanding of complex biological systems in nature? All the bacteria studies can do is to demonstrate local-cause behavior. It sheds no light on the complexities involved in the organization and governance of higher-order biological systems in nature.
Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing, allmendream!
What a marvelous analogy, dearest sister in Christ!
My suspicion is DNA gets its "marching orders" from a non-local cause. If so, the successful communication of information from the non-local source to the receiver is critical. Shannon Information theory specifies a universal model that describes this process.
And of course, information — the message successfully received — is not a physical quantity....
Thank you so much for your splendid observation!
I can't say that I have spent a whole lot of time working on a "scientific" alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. Mainly I've been looking for evidence that the theory really doesn't hold up, on evidentiary and epistemological grounds. In any case, I am neither a working nor a theoretical scientist, merely a student of the history of science, going back to the ancient world and forward.
Darwin's theory calls for gradualism in evolutionary change — which the fossil record doesn't really support. Then when this became more or less generally acknowledged, attempts were made (e.g., punctuated equilibrium) to obviate the question of why the fossil record does not demonstrate the predicted gradualism. Talk about moving the goal post!
But this right there is a major reworking of Darwin's theory. That is, evidently, the theory had to be "fixed" in order better to conform with the evidence we do have.
For myself, I am vastly more interested, not so much in how species change over time, but in what actual biological organisms in general are and how they are organized. In other words, I'm not interested what biological organisms "look like" and how they "change over time," but in what makes them alive in contradistinction to inorganic, non-living systems in the world.
Darwin's theory is absolutely of no help on this question. And certainly I do not subscribe to this description of the evolutionary process:
“Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution. The central concept of biology … is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. All forms of life are the product of chance….” — Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, 1971Having said that, the "evolution I 'accept'" would have to conform to my expectation that all living things consist of the material and immaterial.
WRT the "immaterial": This category includes both natural laws and informational processes. The material refers, of course, to physical matter out of which living bodies are formed.
Of course, since Einstein, we know that "matter" is energy in a particular form.
And also of course, that was not the way Darwin regarded matter. His theory is predicated on Newtonian mechanics, in which "matter" is analogous to teensy billiard balls, and all causation is "local." What natural selection "locks in" comes at the end of a "blind, random" process.
Yet biological systems — and biological functions — seem to be organized by means of non-local cause(s), and — rather than merely random processes — are purposeful processes. That is, they represent systems of causal entailment that appear to serve a natural purpose or goal, or what in philosophy is called a final cause. Of course, Francis Bacon — usually credited as the father of the scientific method — banished final cause from science back in the 16th century.
Be that as it may, I do not think it is possible to answer the question, "What is life?" unless science puts final cause back into its tool kit.
Anyhoot, it appears that homo sapiens sapiens has changed very little, if at all, since around 40,000 B.C. Looks like "stasis" at work here, not gradual evolutionary change....
Just some thoughts, dear allmendream. FWTW.
Thank you so much for writing!
Actually, I’m arguing that God loves you as you are, and that evolution says by and large you’re probably a failure.
I’m married.
Evolution says that everyone who has successful children is a success, by evolutionary standards. Do you find it somehow insidious that learing about it might encourage people to aspire to that?
That a brilliant man like Jefferson could buy into racism is disturbing to say the least.
It is interesting that the scientists of the day saw exactly what they were looking for which reminds me a lot of Popper's analysis of the would-be scientists of his day (Freud and Marx.) And of course of today's Anthropogenic Global Warming scandal.
It doesn't exactly build confidence in scientific observations which lack the ability to be falsified - i.e. theories with great explanatory power but which cannot be put to rigorous tests.
Indeed, it is troubling.
That Jefferson could buy into racism must have something to do with "the human condition," and not so much the quality of his intelligence....
Thank you ever so much for sharing your thoughts, dearest sister in Christ!
A greater challenge for those who would provoke evolution by environmental changes would be to provoke a single cell organism to become multi-cellular, differentiating cells by function or system (e.g. endocrine, cardiovascular). Better yet, provoke the organism to create a new body plan or new system.
Even so, if the organism always responds in the same way to the same provocation it would be more appropriately called an adaption - speaking to the robust capability of the genetic code itself, i.e. to adapt to environmental changes, rather than a novel mutation that happened to work well.
Thank you so much for your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!
Thank you so much for all of your wonderful insights and encouragements, dearest sister in Christ!
It is exceedingly difficult to make any predictions based on theories about any man, whether he is Darwin or someone else.
The theory of evolution, however, is a fantastic predictive tool. Before I can use it to make any predictions, however, it would be helpful to know exactly what I am trying to make predictions about.
Evolution, of course, takes a long view rather than a limited one. Therefore, your having children is no more significant than a passenger pigeon having children 200 years ago.
So you think it would be insignificant if you parents had no children?
If they were still having children, there would still be passenger pigeons. One passenger pigeon having children 200 years ago might meant there would still be passenger pigeons today. One person can make a difference in the lives of many, for many generations, and their offspring, and theirs. Evolution teaches that each and every one of our children presents an almost unlimited potention in the long view.
Excuse. ‘potention’ - ‘potential’
The woman in the article is apparently angry because she thinks “evolution” “kills black people”. Evolution doesn’t kill black people. It does explain how by promoting and adopting abortion, sterilization, homosexuality, and leaving the children they do have un-nurtured and unprepared for life they can eventually do it to themselves.
It would call us to begin a discussion about time. :>)
Technically speaking, DNA acts as information storage and does not actively "do" anything.
DNA has been described as the decryption key that "selects" for the proper information (and description) relevant to express a particular biological entity — everything from bacteria to daffodils to man — from a non-local source.
I have no idea who would have described DNA that way. It is not a "decryption key." It is more analogous to a blueprint, except that it is messy and prone to error. A small amount of DNA is exactly analogous, letter for letter, to RNA. Enzymes attach to those parts of the DNA and make the RNA in a process called transcription. The RNA is then processed--chunks of it are cut out and discarded, and the remaining RNA is spliced back together. The amount of discarded RNA dwarfs the part that is kept. Some of the RNA molecules code for proteins through the triplet code--each triplet of three letters signifies an amino acid, which are connected in a process called translation. Near those parts of the DNA that code for RNA are control elements, which tell enzymes where and when to attach. Other parts of the DNA have nothing to do with protein or RNA; as far as we can tell, they take up space. And that's all they do.
Trying to give a full description of the role of DNA within the cell, and all the various controls of transcription and translation, and all the other things that I did not mention, is impossible here. You can read the Wikipedia article for an overview.
When I said that DNA is a messy blueprint, I meant just that: imagine a book with only four letters, and in over half of the book, those letters are placed completely randomly. It is also prone to error: the DNA letters spontaneously become damaged, and certain things (like UV light) damage DNA in very characteristic ways. There are repair enzymes, which are not 100% efficient; as a result, the older you get, the more errors accumulate in your DNA.
What I have described here is more applicable to eukaryotic DNA: the DNA of bacteria and archaea is far more compact, with very little in the way of unused space-filling DNA.
The main thing to remember about DNA and all of the interactions between it and the other molecules that make up a cell is that there is no intelligence guiding its interactions. Every process that occurs inside a cell is strictly a chemical/physical process. Every cellular process can be replicated chemically outside of a cell. Cells don't care if you stick DNA from other species inside them; yeast cells will just as readily use human genes as they will their own. Despite the physicochemical basis of cell function, the one thing I cannot do is make an unalive cell into a living cell.
And I think I'm getting kind of wordy and missing the point I was trying to make. It's late...
Being a biochemist/molecular biologist, and having grown probably billions of cells for experimentation, I can confidently say that I do not know what it means for them to be alive. I have seen that living cells can be removed from a dead animal (or dead person): what does that mean? I don't know. Henrietta Lacks died years before I was born, yet her cells are still alive in labs worldwide. Does that mean that Mrs. Lacks is stuck on earth, or can we assume that her spirit moved on?
There really are questions that science cannot answer. I prefer not to think about them too much; I like to know answers, and that means sticking with those questions that *can* be answered.
Darwin's theory is absolutely of no help on this question. And certainly I do not subscribe to this description of the evolutionary process:
“Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution. The central concept of biology … is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. All forms of life are the product of chance….” — Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, 1971
The "chance" that Monod spoke of really is not as random as you might think. Within the context of evolution, chance is more like rolling dice: the result is random, but it will always be constrained by the physical nature of the dice. You will never roll dice and get an ice cream cone, for instance. You will always see a number of pips, falling between n=the number of dice and 6n. DNA has four letters: those letters can be interchanged for each other, or letters can be added or subtracted. There really is nothing else that can happen. The effect of those letters changing depends on where they are; if they are in a protein coding gene, they can change the protein--but not always--and the change may cause the protein to be more, less, or equally functional. If a change in function is the result, it can be advantageous, disadvantageous, or neutral to survival. All random, yes, but within very narrow constraints.
Having said that, the "evolution I 'accept'" would have to conform to my expectation that all living things consist of the material and immaterial.
Of necessity, science is firmly entrenched within the realm of the material. Within the scientific community, we are way beyond debating whether the theory of evolution best describes the known facts and has sufficient predictive power; we're busily adding details and refining what we know. We will never get to the point where we can address metaphysical questions with evolution, or any other science.
Even if we could reach the point where we can assemble a living thing in the lab, from scratch, what would that mean? If we could produce an organism that had all the characteristics of the first living thing, what would that mean? I don't think that would answer what life is (in the metaphysical sense) at all.
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