Posted on 06/25/2007 5:18:09 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Right from the get-go, there on a sign at the entrance to the Evolution exhibit at the Field Museum, real science takes a stand:
"Evolution is one of science's best-supported theories."
Perfect. A profound truth flatly stated, without a hint of equivocation.
Why this pleases me so much, I'm not sure. What did I expect from one of the world's great natural science museums? A diorama of Adam and Eve tossing Frisbees to dinosaurs?
Evolution is, to be sure, one of science's most solid theories, right up there with the theory of gravity, and about this there is zero controversy -- among scientists.
But step outside the realm of real science and rational thought -- step instead into that parallel world of pseudo-science and faith before reason -- and you might pick up a different impression.
You might even come to believe, swayed by the junk science and misinformation of religiously motivated critics, that evolution is one absurdly crazy idea -- c'mon, men from monkeys?
You'd be wrong, of course. You'd be on the same side of history as the biblical literalists who mocked Copernicus and Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the sun.
But what the heck. You could still be president.
George Bush himself says the study of Intelligent Design (biblical creationism dressed in a borrowed lab jacket) has a place in science classrooms.
I've often wondered about that. Is the president pandering to the religious right? Could be. Or is he just profoundly ignorant for a Yale boy? Also entirely possible.
And then there was that debate on TV a couple of weeks ago among the nine men running for the Republican nomination for president. When the moderator asked them to raise their hands if they ''didn't believe in evolution," three hands went up -- Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado.
I was stunned. I was mortified.
I turned to my son and shook my head and said: "Jesus. ..."
Next time those three bright boys come through Chicago, they had better visit the Field Museum.
Look for natural explanations "We're a natural history museum -- we're not a seminary, we're not a religious organization," said Lance Grande, senior vice president and head of collections and research at the Field Museum. "Our job is to look for natural explanations for complex phenomena." Grande was walking me through the museum's new Darwin exhibit, which runs through the end of the year, and the museum's permanent Evolution exhibit. Both shows represent an effort by the museum to champion the scientific foundations of evolution -- natural selection and genetics -- at a time when evolution is under political and religious assault.
Polls show that at least 40 percent of Americans reject evolution, believing that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.
But Grande said he doubts that most people have seriously thought the issue through.
"There's a huge number of the population that really doesn't care," he said. "So they go to a spiritual adviser. It's not as though they've looked at the evidence and decided evolution is wrong."
All the same, I said, the Field Museum must have anticipated a backlash when it mounted its Evolution and Darwin exhibits.
Grande nodded. "Let me show you something," he said.
Debating an ID man Back in his office, Grande printed out a remarkable 10-page document that, until now, he'd shown only to colleagues. It was a copy of a debate he had carried on by e-mail for about a week in fall 2005 with a defender of Intelligent Design. Scientists are usually loath to debate the Intelligent Design crowd, largely because it's impossible to reason with zealots. But this particular man, a retired elementary school science teacher back East, struck Grande as thoughtful, earnest and -- perhaps best of all -- cordial.
The teacher, whom Grande asked me not to name or quote directly, offered the central ID concept of "irreducible complexity" -- the idea that some things found in nature, such as the human eye, are simply too perfect, too complex, and composed of too many otherwise useless parts to have evolved from anything else. The entire eye could only have been "designed" all at once by an "intelligent" force. You know, like maybe God.
Grande's reply was to point out that every time proponents of ID resolve a mystery of nature by crediting an "intelligent designer," they create a scientific "dead end."
"We already know that there is a theological explanation available for any unresolved question about nature. But that is not science," he wrote. "In science, we need to investigate what needs investigating, not what we have given up on by considering it unexplainable by natural causes. ... Once something is accepted as of divine origin, it is no longer an issue of science. It has become something else."
To another argument made by the teacher -- that the personal religious convictions of many famous scientists over the centuries means God has a place in science -- Grande replied: "Just because religion has been accepted by various scientists through history, this does not make science out of religion. It only means that in addition to having an interest in science, many scientists have also had religious beliefs."
And that, in fact, was Grande's overarching message in the e-mail debate: Science is science, and religion is religion. They are not necessarily in conflict but belong in different realms.
"Even in schools where religion is taught," he wrote, "religion should be taught in religion classes and science should be taught in science classes, and comparisons of the two are a job for philosophy classes."
Evolution predicts the future Darwin's theory of evolution explains and organizes much of what has come before. But like all established theories in science, it also has predictive powers -- it can tell us what comes next. Scientists are hard at work on a vaccine for avian flu, for example, because they can confidently predict it's just a matter of time before the deadly virus mutates -- a form of evolution -- and jumps species from birds to humans.
"The theory of evolution," Grande says, "benefits a society interested in improving."
Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column runs Mondays.
mailto:tmcnamee@suntimes.com
Biology is not a class in logic. What is logical about, say, meiosis?
Like it or not, wiping out (loss of) intermediates is exactly what much evolution is about...the so called, but not actually, “missing” links.
Want to try again?
The correct answer for species has been given several times on this thread.
Keep in mind that the topic is biological evolution.
2) What I say is that whether evolution is divinely guided is not within the scope of science.
3) I have never heard of Black Baptists or Orthodox Jews mocking us, and the grievances of the "indigenous peoples" have no known connection to evolution.
Sure.
Had you thought this wa a “run, Fred run” thread?
“Biology is not a class in logic.”
But it’s not a class in magic, either.
Correct. Which is a good reason to study the processes involved in evolution in order to better undertand them.
evolution is so strong that it’s believers will not allow opposing theories of ID and creationism to be taught alongside it in public schools; even to the extreme nuttyness of saying they are not scientific. That is pretty convincing to me!
This article duplicates the refutations of ID made on many FR threads. In the final analysis, the most cogent statement made is that there is no reasoning with zealots.
Yes, really.
Of course, if you know of such support, I would like to see it.
You think ID and creationism are scientific?
LOL. Are we really going to argue of lines vs italics? The argument will be one-sided. You only. Cheers.
Darwin said that future fossil discoveries would either support or retract from his theory. Over the last century, the latter is true.
In a nutshell, Darwin's theory states that all life has a common ancestor and through the slow process of natural selection do we have the countless species of today. Yet, all available evidence today soundly refutes this. The Cambian explosion turns Darwin's theory on its head. It marked a rapid expansion of species proliferation with no common ancestor.
No kidding. Maybe he was browsing FR's evolution/ID threads.
If you know of such evidence, I would like to see it.
It marked a rapid expansion of species proliferation with no common ancestor.
How do you know there was no common ancestor?
Previously it was viwed as some sort of attraction between bits of matter, kind of like the electromagnetic or weak forces might generate but with a different range.
The MATHEMATICAL PRECISION for reporting on the measurement of gravity's action certainly improved, but Newton's theory was not, in and of itself, improved one whit. It's still there. You can learn it in a day. No big thing. Einstein's theory is completely different.
We recently went through something similar when the humane genome was decoded/coded. Instead of having one gene for each protein we ended up having a million proteins and 30,000 genes.
Obviously something was going on that had not been anticipated by the then current theory of evolution.
The motive force for this finding is still a mystery although there are some tenative approaches under development ~ they all have to do with theories of information flow, least cost energy pathways and quantum effects at the macroscale. The earlier theory was more about eating lunch and having sex than anything else.
I'd suggest the basis of the theory of evolution has now changed so much that no current text is really up to date.
It's time to abandon the "mechanism" hypothesized two centuries ago and take a good look at what's really going on at the cellular level.
Well, that’s quite a trick. He must have mastered time travel somewhere along the line, because he died in 1955. Either I’m younger than I thought, or I can’t do math.
"Reporters should learn something before they write nonsense."
And so should you.
There's very good evidence that we had to breed back into them more than once to pick up some of the characeristics we have, or, alternatively, there are means of transmitting chunks of genome between one critter and another that we have not yet discovered.
Or, maybe those lady chimps were just too attractive for the fellows ~ you know how they do.
Or, maybe we aren't really a different species ~
Why the cellular level?
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