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
You need a better link. What I got was:
Conquer PTSD, StressI could have gone all day without running into that junk.
and any Addiction!
Effortlessly . . . and it's FREE!alcohol • drugs • cigarettes • pornography
Download free“Be Still & Know”
Then, when it works, download“Anger Management” and learn how to overcome Stress, Fear and Pain.
I’m sorry to hear that...I think the be still exercise would help you have alot of clarity and peace of mind. Right now you just have a whole bunch of false knowledge which seems plausible to your mind. But we are all controlled through our thoughts and words by either the good side in a wordless way, or the darkside with a bunch of words and thoughts that just lead us down a rosie path which eventually leads to unhappiness and misery.
Sigh . . .
Perhaps you could discard your superior intellect long enough to actually put up an argument. Arrogance and condescension makes a poor substitute for a reasonable premise. Let's take a closer look at your evolution, shall we?
Natural selection is a process that causes heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common, and harmful traits to become rarer. This occurs because organisms with advantageous traits pass on more copies of the traits to the next generation. Over many generations, adaptations occur through a combination of successive, small, random changes in traits, and the natural selection of the variants best-suited for their environment . . .
The similarities between organisms suggest that all known species are descended from a single ancestral species through this process of gradual divergence.
Perhaps the lack of understanding is your own.
You really have an aversion to making an argument that is factually based, don't you?!
I don't even know what "creationism" says as a scientific theory; I've never looked into it. I've read the Voyage of the Beagle and understand Darwin to that extent. I've read that their is no clear evidence supporting natural selection and a lot of "absent evidence" that makes it unlikely. So far this is a silly thread in that only one person actually posted evidence for natural selection, the mosquito in London, and that was being argued by scientists as to whether speciation had occured or whether it was just adaptation.
Sorry...you said all life, not all known species, natural selection is one aspect of evolution and may occur at varying rates (you said “over long periods of time”)and you did not say evolution, you said Darwinism.
As I said, your phrasing shows you do not understand the subject well enough to ask a proper, answerable question.
There is nothihng wrong with ignorance in a field, or even difficulty with understanding. I struggle with calculus and several aspects of statistics, Evolution is harder than it looks. Even those who do not challenge it often have misconceptions as to how it works and most popularizations oversimplify too much.
Sorry if it seems arrogant to you for me to say that I know my field, but I do.
All I have seen so far is your pathetic attempt to redefine evolution. Since you are unable to defend it as it is, you try altering it (without basis) to cover up its gaping holes.
Incidentally, can you produce an example of life that does not fall under the category of "all known species"?
Sorry, I get paid to teach this stuff and no one has fired me for not knowing my subject.
As for “life that does not fall under the category of all known species,” lurkers may be interested in the following:
Evolution without speciation but with selection: LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor in Gilbert’s RNA world
http://www.funpecrp.com.br/gmr/year2003/vol4-2/gmr0070_full_text.htm
and:
Gene Transfer in Bacteria: Speciation Without Species?
www.pitt.edu/~biohome/Dept/pdf/1400.pdf
Once again, without sufficient background, it is difficult to ask good questions, much less challenge an entire field of study.
Allow me to clarify, I don't hold a belief in Darwin. I believe evolution currently is the best explanation for the facts we currently have and life on Earth. As a believer in science, my beliefs are open to change as new information is discovered.
You really have an aversion to making an argument that is factually based, don't you?!
Since you haven't based your argument on facts, I don't understand why this would upset you.
Allow me to clarify, I don't hold a belief in Darwin. I believe evolution currently is the best explanation for the facts we currently have and life on Earth. As a believer in science, my beliefs are open to change as new information is discovered.
You really have an aversion to making an argument that is factually based, don't you?!
Since you haven't based your argument on facts, I don't understand why this would upset you.
Because it's not scientific.
I've read that their is no clear evidence supporting natural selection and a lot of "absent evidence" that makes it unlikely.
You don't believe in natural selection? You don't even have to know what evolution is to understand how natural selection works. Look at bacteria and antibiotics. As antibiotics are misused, some bacteria become resistant. Natural selection explains how the resistant bacteria survive and the nonresistant bacteria do not. Is that clear enough for you?
So far this is a silly thread in that only one person actually posted evidence for natural selection,
As opposed to all the posted evidence for creationism? LOL!
So also with Newton himself; his first care was to show that his law of gravity predicted Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Kepler, it is safe to say, never dreamed of anything like Newton's law; but his work was a major step up all the same.
Actually, the 1905 paper did not deal with gravity at all. Einstein did not solve that difficult problem until 1915, which is still earlier than most people realize.
“Natural selection” would dictate that a giraffe would have a much shorter neck.
So, "nearly a century" or "barely a century" ~ only Einstein knows exactly when and he, of course, is dead.
How can you prove that?
Absent that, I can put up a strong reasonable argument that giraffes would be better served with shorter necks. Funny how you have failed utterly in putting up your own reasonable argument. I wonder why.
Then go ahead and prove it.
Funny how you have failed utterly in putting up your own reasonable argument.
You want a reasonable argument? Giraffes with longer necks have more access to food and can better spot predators.
Giraffes with long necks require more water. Scarcity of water is far more common in Africa than scarcity of food. Having longer necks also makes it harder to eat shrubs which are far more plentiful on the African savannah than taller trees. Both of these show that natural selection would result in shorter necks for giraffes - not longer ones. Also, female giraffes have necks two feet shorter than male ones. Am I to believe by your reasoning that natural selection for female giraffes is somehow different than natural selection for male ones? And then there's that same problem that the fossil records contain no such transition for neck elongation for the species. So basically, your whole natural selection argument is a load of crap. It's interesting that the same natural selection didn't allow for other species to grow longer necks as well. Go figure.
When?
Having longer necks also makes it harder to eat shrubs which are far more plentiful on the African savannah than taller trees.
When?
Also, female giraffes have necks two feet shorter than male ones. Am I to believe by your reasoning that natural selection for female giraffes is somehow different than natural selection for male ones?
Why are human men taller than human women? Why are male lions bigger than female lions? LOL!
And then there's that same problem that the fossil records contain no such transition for neck elongation for the species.
Your proof for creationism is a hole in the fossil record? If they find the transition fossils tomorrow, will you agree that evolution is true?
So basically, your whole natural selection argument is a load of crap.
Based on your "proof"? LOL!
It's interesting that the same natural selection didn't allow for other species to grow longer necks as well.
The necks of all other species are exactly the same length?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.