Doubting Didymus

Hominid family trees often get revised when new fossils are found, or new phylogenetic data arises. Same as the rest of the scientific world.

Biologists debate over whether or not viruses are 'alive'. Why? because the line between 'alive' and 'not alive' is fairly broad. Big deal. How is this contradictory, spurious or false?

Cells are complex and not yet fully understood.

Good greif! Knock me down with a feather! How could I have missed that one? Are you telling me that biologists do not have all the answers to every possible question about everything in the living world? How will they be able to hold their heads up to the physicists (who have pretty much everything worked out in their field of course) at the next science convention? Better go back to the drawing board and sketch up a theory that isn't so blind and dogmatic! Wow, cells being complex, who saw that one coming?

Apologies for the sarcasm, but really. What on earth makes you think that not knowing everything about cells is a problem specific to evolution? Wouldn't that be a problem with all biology, and most of chemistry too?

scigirl

No!! Churches reject basic tenets of science because they contradict with their narrow view of the Bible. That is the ONLY reason. Oh, and because humans are arrogant. "I didn't evolve from no ape."

When Galileo first proposed his theories, scientists were still skeptical. "Show me the data" they said. Churches, on the other hand, were downright frightened and said "Get in your house and don't come out you heathen."

Same thing with evolution. Scientists were not at all completely convinced by Darwin - especially because he didn't have a mechanism worked out yet (of course now we do - it's called genetics). Again, the churches just outright rejected the theory - NOT because of evidence, but because the Bible says "God created the earth in 6 days blah blah blah."

Yes science education needs some work - absolutely. We need to teach our kids how to think critically, instead of just memorize species names.

However, churches are not helping this problem. In fact right now they are making it worse - they want scientists to put "disclaimers" on a theory which has hoards of evidence, because a book with ZERO evidence tells them it's wrong. How on earth are we going to teach our kids how to think critically when their parents are doing THAT??

scigirl

dk

<ol type="1">[*]dk:- General evolutionary theory has failed to solve a single problems in the real world.
lpetrich: There are oodles of counterexamples, though most of them are of microevolution. However, macroevolution has proved useful in understanding the organization of genomes -- a large number of genes in the human genome have been identified by comparing to other species, like mice and rats and fish. Yes, fish.
dk: I agree, clearly genetics governs the lifecycle of people, fish, insects, plants and microbes. As a practical matter Mendel found genes and the science of genetics independent of Darwin’s Theory, and visa versa. I think this demonstrates evolution and genetics are independent, each independently contributing insights about the other. Where the two sciences agree on the some particular matter, then the matter is confirmed by independent sources.[*]dk:: - Many questions resist scientific methods, and creationism properly understood endows people with a sense of the sacred that clarifies human dignity, freedom, and liberty.
lpetrich: However, "goddidit" seems like an all-purpose non-explanation to me.
dk: Science and metaphysics are independent sources.[*]dk:- For example evolution science lacks the wherewithal to answer the simplest questions about the mind-body problem, self and consciousness,
lpetrich: These are a completely separate problem, though I will concede that consciousness continues to be a riddle. However, much of the animal kingdom does have a limited amount of mental capability, and some species, like chimps, are almost human in some ways. And computers also have some amount of mental capability, even though computer-chip makers do not put any mind-stuff into their chips.
dk: That’s not what the EPA, global warming, and the Kyoto Treaty says.[*]dk- :much less address the hard questions about “intelligent design” verses “the creative forces of the universe”.
lpetrich: And how would one identify "intelligent design"?
dk: I don’t have a crystal ball, but the impact of people upon the planet seems to be governed by a pattern. I think war, irresponsible stewardship by industrial nations, and the development of 3rd world nations pose the three greatest threats to the environment.[*]dk: Evolutionary science has great difficulty debunking the simplest frauds like phrenology, Piltdown Skull, Mead’s study of Samoans and Kinsey’s maniacal depiction of human sexuality.
lpetrich: Except that only Piltdown has anything to do with evolution, and it was very controversial during the time that it was "accepted". The first Piltdown find, in 1905, was widely dismissed as a composite, though the second one, in 1915, dampened that criticism by seemingly asking too much of coincidence. However, when hominid finds started coming out of Africa, starting with Raymond Dart's Taung child, they proved the opposite of the Piltdown finds. Instead of a humanlike brain and an apelike jaw, they had almost-apelike brains and humanlike posture. Though British paleoanthropologists continued to defend the Piltdown fossils, others became were much more skeptical. When the hoax was exposed in 1955, it was, in a sense, the final vindication of the composite theory.
dk: People are a force of nature that evolutionary science can’t ignore. For thousands of years people have hunted species into extinction, human migrations move none indigenous species around the globe, domestication of animals, systematic clear and burn agriculture dates back 10s of thousands of years. Whatever influences civilization becomes an evolutionary variable.[*]lpetrich: And what are private schools and "Christian" schools like? Are they a bunch of inegalitarian anarchists?
dk: Islamic schools teach Islamic Doctrine, Catholic schools teach Catholic Doctrine, and Military Schools teach Military Doctrine etc.. Public schools promote government doctrine, and use science as an excuse to turn the law into a weapon. I suspect education and god weren’t mention in the US Constitution because the Founding Fathers subscribed to the principle subsidiarity as indicated by the 10th Amendment. Speaking of using a law as a weapon it was a fat headed Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision that set off the Civil War, Reconstruction, de jure segregation and de jure integration.[*]dk: ... and the general reliability of post-modern psychology literally hinges upon psychedelic comedy pitting psychoanalysts, behaviorists and psychotropic therapists at one another’s throats looking for a scapegoat. ...
lpetrich: What does that have to do with evolutionary biology?
dk: Culture is a force of evolution, therefore concerns evolutionary theory. .[*]dk: ...The tragedy of errors ranks one rational tyrant worse than the previous, including Mercantilism, Imperialism, Laissez-faire Capitalism, Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, Nationalism, NAZISM, and Communism.[*]lpetrich: Nazism was a fundamentally irrational ideology -- and not surprisingly a very incoherent one.
dk: Tell that to Galton, Nietzsche or Hegel, but personally I agree.
lpetrich: Their economic policies might best be called expediency -- sometimes anti-business populism, sometimes sucking up to Big Business.
dk: Call it what you want, but since God died the sources of economic doctrine has been science. What does this have to do with evolution, once again, evolution must accept human endeavor as a causal agent.
lpetrich: And laissez-faire capitalism is something that many right-wingers profess to believe in. I would not be one bit surprised if dk has been known to profess undying love of the "free enterprise system".
dk: Actually I’m a fiscal liberal but a social conservative. I like doctrines of environmental stewardship, unions and a living family wage, but have real problems with government schools, civil courts and social engineering.[*]doubtingt ... Science in general and evolution in particular have greatly increased our understanding of the mind-body problem and the massive amounts of evidence contradicts the predictions of dualism and supports the predictions of materialistic monism.
dk: - Another dogmatic statement posited upon blind faith in the social sciences. Your retort escapes into the esoteric world of hobnob. ...
lpetrich: This is not typical "social science", but relatively hard biological science, involving finding the functions of different parts of the brain. By comparison, most social science treats the brain as a black box. This is not meant as a put-down; much successful "hard" science is done in a similar fashion.
dk: I like hard science, and locating visual, auditory, language etc.. centers in the brain have many medical applications. But to be certain, there are many parallels between neuropsychology and phrenology. I suspect cellular biology comes closest to unlocking the black box of the mind. While psychotropic therapists are quick to explain happy pills cure chemical or genetic defects in the mind, their diagnosis remains clinical. Some patients addicted to happy pills will say or believe anything for a fix. The whole exercise reeks of rationalization, not hard science.[*]dk: Yet Macro evolution lacks a beginning, mechanism, direction, destination or purpose.
lpetrich: Evolution has had a beginning: the origin of life.
dk: Evolution presents an untested hypothesis as evidence.[*]lpetrich: It has a mechanism: variation + natural selection.
dk: A mechanism for micro-evolution, not macro.
lpetrich: Its only "direction" is a side effect of its mechanism.
dk: By direction I mean moving from greater to less complexity, or visa versa. Happenstance doesn’t explain up line processes.
lpetrich: Why does it have to have a destination or a purpose?
dk: All known Human civilizations look forward by conforming to purpose, goals and objectives. Human civilizations being a causal agent of evolution begs the question.[*]dk: Public Schools are failing on their own merits, and the more $money government pours into the monopoly the worse education gets. (lots of linking it to evolutionary biology...)
lpetrich: That's a completely separate issue.
dk: Since the institution of public education transmits cultural values from one generation to the next, education concerns evolution. To the extent public schools replace the family as the basic unit of culture, education becomes a causal agent of evolutionary science.[*]lpetrich: Nature/nurture is reasonably well-understood for many species. It is simply difficult to untangle in our species.
dk: Bad science overstates the evidence.[*]lpetrich: Beauty may simply be our experience of being attracted to certain sights. And the metabolism of a cell is actually fairly well-understood, especially for bacteria. No special life-stuff is necessary. Although there are still gaps in our knowledge, a life-stuff of the gaps is a superfluous hypothesis.
dk: How well people understand “life-stuff” is relative. By 18th Century standards our material understanding has improved tremendously, yet by year 23rd Century standards today’s knowledge may be considered offish, egocentric and criminal. The real question is the reliability of positive knowledge, and to date it hasn’t been reliable at all. I submit, “people are losing the ability to solve the most basic problems, and since civilizations grow and prosper by solving problems, and come to ruin when everyday problems are insoluble”, we need a reality check. The number of civilizations that lay in ruin makes the point abundantly, empirically and emphatically apparent.[*]dk: - I was taught there’s no such thing as a dumb question. I mean you just claimed there are plenty of transitional forms in the fossil record, yet punctuated equilibrium is a widely accepted scientific theory fashioned to explain the absence of transitional forms.
lpetrich: Species-to-species transitional forms are known to exist, though they are very rare. And if the appearance of PE implies special creation, then it must be special creation of millions of species over geological time, each one not much different from some other species.
dk: I’m happy to concede PE doesn’t support special creation, clearly the proposition can’t be tested.[*]dk: Rebuff: This describes micro, not macro evolution. Micro evolution was explained by Gregor Mendel from pea plants independent of Darwin’s Theories. ...
lpetrich: Mendel's work was on heredity, not evolution.
1) And what is macroevolution supposed to be?
2)(a lot of dk's bellyaching about Margaret Mead...)
3) I do not care about Margaret Mead.
dk: Mendel founded the science of genetics, not heredity. Is heredity a science? If so then who found it?
1) <a href="http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=616281&secid=.-" target="_blank"> macroevolution </a> Evolution above the species level, i.e. the development of new species, genera, families, orders, etc. There is no agreement as to whether macroevolution results from the accumulation of small changes due to microevolution, or whether macroevolution is uncoupled from microevolution. -----A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, © Oxford University Press 1999
2 & 3) Mead was a pioneer linking education, social science, child development with cultural and physical anthropology. My bellyaching about Mead demonstrates the damage and waste rationalized under the banner of science. .
.
The speed and “lack of critical discussion” within the scientific community undermines Science, not creationism. Likewise Mendel’s research lay buried on a shelf 30 years while the Pillars of Science were busy debating Darwin’s exotic finches & Galton’s Eugenics as a rationalization for persecuting inferior peoples like Jews, Blacks, Women and Armenians. Go figure, but most people think there’s a lesson to be learned here. I quite frankly don’t understand your apathy.[*]lpetrich: But if it is so misleading, why are you using the term "evolutionism"?
dk: Because the science of evolution absent evidence becomes a source of doctrine, just as the Bible is a source of doctrine in the creationism story.[*]dk: - You have no point, my point all along has been that evolutionism is doctrine, irrelevant to science. You keep trying to justify evolutionary doctrine as essential to science, and you are failing miserably.
lpetrich: It's necessary to biological science.
dk: Necessity implies metaphysics not science.[*]dk:: ... and modern science as known to Western Civilization was inspired by Christian Doctrine. ...
lpetrich: So Copernicus and Galileo were inspired to consider heliocentrism by reading the part of the Bible where Joshua tells the Sun to stop moving?
dk: I have no idea what specific biblical passages inspired Copernicus and Galileo, I would assume they read more than one verse though. Do evolutionists now claim the power to read minds and hearts of historical people, like the Oracle of Delphi.[*]lpetrich: There is abundant evidence of what dk seems to mean by that in parasites. For example, Sacculina, a parasite of crabs, looks like a simple blob, but it has a free-swimming larval phase that looks much like crustacean "nauplius" larvae. For that reason, Sacculina is thought to be a simplified crustacean, most likely a barnacle.
dk: I’m told good science looks past appearance, and bad science justifies itself to keep up appearances. Your statement is an example of the later.[*]dk: The Big Bang yields nothing but a dead end. The origin of life theory follows from the Big Bang. ...
lpetrich:The origin of life has NOTHING to do with the Big Bang.
dk: So life first existed in some non-existent place (eternity), then created the real universe (with a big bang). Interesting, but in real science human life evolved subsequent and contingent upon the Big Bang or whatever the first cause of the universe should happen to be. This sounds positively metaphysical.[/list=a]

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

dk

I find it odd you beleive planets unrelated to evolution. Here I thought the people of earth lived on the planet earth,

Skydancer

Some of us do, at least.

Seriously, there is no requirement that a biosphere has to be attached to a planet. As soon as you have any environment that allows self-replicating chemistry, evolution will kick in. For interesting speculations, read Niven's The Integral Trees or Forward's Dragon's Egg.

(Edited to fix punctuation.)

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: Skydancer ]</p>

Xixax

Am I the only one that notices a severe lack of context to dk's responses? For instance:

............

What exactly does that response have to do with explaining intelligent design?

And....

I mean, am I just missing something or is dk just having a hard time keeping up with his troll costume? I'm starting to think he may very well be an 'infidel' pretending to be an evasive troll....

*shrug*

dk

• scigirl: No!! Churches reject basic tenets of science because they contradict with their narrow view of the Bible. That is the ONLY reason. Oh, and because humans are arrogant. "I didn't evolve from no ape."
  dk: Whether and how and what it means to say “people evolved from apes” doesn’t necessarily contradict Biblical Doctrine. The Bible says people are created in God’s image from dirt, and evolution claims people evolved from dirt. I don’t believe science comments on matters of the soul. Whether someone wishes to believe human life is sacred because people have souls, or because people have blue eyes is a personal matter. Now, when blue eyed people use the law as a weapon against brown eyed people, then the Law tutors people in lawlessness. For example 1st Amendment Law requires public school administrators to censors religious speech in government schools. Many religious people are offended by such wide eyed fanaticism. When people can’t live under the law, they are divided by the law, and forced to live lawlessly.
• scigirl: When Galileo first proposed his theories, scientists were still skeptical. "Show me the data" they said. Churches, on the other hand, were downright frightened and said "Get in your house and don't come out you heathen."
  dk: The conventional wisdom of the day stemmed from Aristotle, not the Bible. And even today most people see the sun set, not the earth rotate. I can’t ever remember anyone saying, “let’s go watch the earth rotate away from the sun”. In fact Kepler published his findings before Galileo and Galileo publicly attacked and scorned Kepler. Newton worked from Kepler’s calculations because Galileo made some grave errors. Check it out.
• scigirl: Same thing with evolution. Scientists were not at all completely convinced by Darwin - especially because he didn't have a mechanism worked out yet (of course now we do - it's called genetics). Again, the churches just outright rejected the theory - NOT because of evidence, but because the Bible says "God created the earth in 6 days blah blah blah."
  dk: What churches? Certainly not the Catholic Church never published such a Papal Encyclicals ex cathedra. I’ll bet you can’t produce dogma from Orthodox Jewish or eve Islam that calls evolution a heresy. I think you’ve been hooked by rumor, propaganda and fairytales. By and large the resistance too evolutionism comes from people offended by the tactics of evolutionists.
• scigirl: Yes science education needs some work - absolutely. We need to teach our kids how to think critically, instead of just memorize species names.
  However, churches are not helping this problem. In fact right now they are making it worse - they want scientists to put "disclaimers" on a theory which has hoards of evidence, because a book with ZERO evidence tells them it's wrong. How on earth are we going to teach our kids how to think critically when their parents are doing THAT??
  dk: Children certainly don’t learn critical thinking from censorship, government indoctrination, bureaucrats, demagogues or social engineering. I generally agree though, but think the issue has much broader implications.

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

Xixax

So, if a religion found young human sacrifice important, the law would be to blame for their lawlessness?

Keeping state funds from sponsoring/endorsing/teaching religion in -no- way effects their ability to practice that religion. Children can bring their Bible to school, they can even witness to other children about it ( obviously not on class time ). The schools are open to them for clubs after hours..

I mean, this mock persecution you seem to present just doesn't exist. So... you can't have spirituality and the super-natural taught to children in public school: <img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

I can't have strict naturalism taught either. However, both of us should be able to agree that the sciences, history etc., is something that should be taught. In that way, evolution is a perfectly acceptable subject matter. It has no opinion or stance on human spirituality. None. It does conflict with literalist interpretations of some particular religions holy books, but that hardly makes it something that should be kept from schools.

HA! There is ample evidence on this board alone that statement is rubbish! I wish there were a way to have you back up that statement, but it would be unrealistic to even ask. I can say from MY experience on this board and many others, you are absolutely wrong.

Not only that, what tactics are you talking about anyway? Teaching? Heh.... you are still in this "evilutionist conspiracy" mode were you somehow feel there is a large group of people hiding "the truth" from everyone else. That isn't the case. How could such information be stopped?

It's so easy to release and publish information these days, that if there were any truth to any of the garbage your spewing out about a lack of evidence for evolution, it would be widely discussed, and thought would change! It may very well happen. It's extremely unlikely considering the overwhelming amount of positive evidence for evolution, but the fact that it's not a dogmatic religious belief means it can be overturned by evidence. Not by whining, not by wishing it away, not by thinking we must be more special than just another evolved species on this planet, but by evidence. Until that happens, and it more than likely never will, evolution belongs in the biology classroom.

Ahh, back to the evilutionist conspiracy between government, the schools, research labs, universities, and laymen like myself. *sigh*

You as of yet have offered nothing to replace evolution with as a working theory. You are only taking the same negative position creationists use, saying "is not is not is not is not is not is not". You offer nothing for anyone else to examine, not even an idea of what your theory might be.

The problem you have with evolution is all you. Evolution is a science. It's facts, theory, mechanisms and observations. It has no morality or amorality. It doesn't need or deny a God. It doesn't speak to any social ills or causes.

[editing a bit for ubb code, spelling blah blah. ]

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: Xixax ]</p>

lpetrich

Because some things are well-established. For example, the existence of the force of gravity, not only microgravity that pulls us to the Earth, but also macrogravity that pulls the Moon toward the Earth. Someone who accepts the existence of microgravity but not macrogravity would be justifiably laughed at.

I don't see the connection between these oddities and biological evolution.

That's totally beside the point. Mendel's work was an important step forward, but it did not address the patterns of similarity of the genes of different organisms. That was to be the job of evolutionary biology.

Which are TOTALLY separate issues. O dk, why do you insist on mixing things up?

ANOTHER intrusion of irrelevancy.

YET ANOTHER intrusion of irrelevancy. This has NO direct connection with evolutionary biology, except for the question of the evolution of mind.

Congratulations on your having an interesting political position. I made that comment because I have seen large numbers of right-wingers profess undying love for the "free enterprise system" -- even as they denounce businesses they dislike, like the entertainment industry, Microsoft, or whatever.

However, nonrandom selection can produce change in the direction of greater order. Try putting a lot of toy magnets into a box and then shaking it. Notice how the magnets tend to stick to each other, forming chains.

What you have presented, O dk, has nothing whatsoever to do with biological evolution. Your making a villain out of the public schools and a hero out of "the family" is a totally separate issue.

I would not lose much sleep over that, because science is cumulative. Newtonian mechanics was not overthrown by modern physics, but was shown to be a relatively-accessible special case of it. And the same would hold true of the present-day understanding of cellular metabolism. Future generations would simply fill in the gaps, and it is reasonable to extrapolate that no special life-stuff will ever be found.

Typical quote-mining.

And what does this have to do with evolutionary biology?

However, evolutionary biology was not a common rationalization for these persecutions, which had started long before Charles Darwin was born. Anti-Semitism is a centuries-old Christian tradition; Jews had long been labeled "Christ-killers", and were even suspected of using in matzohs the blood of Christian babies. Adolf Hitler had simply gone farther than most anti-Semites had been willing to. And blacks were considered to have the curse that Noah had placed on his son Ham for being a Peeping Tom.

No, the origin of life had happened AFTER the Big Bang, and has no direct connection to it.

Lots of misunderstandings. Aristotle and the Bible agreed on the Earth being stationary, though not on the shape of the Earth; Aristotle was one of the first to state the Earth's approximate sphericity, while the Bible implies in some places that the Earth is flat.

And where had Galileo attacked Kepler? These two gentlemen had been good friends, and they had shared some chuckles at the expense of their Aristotle-thumping colleagues. Also, Galileo had never done the sort of celestial-mechanics calculations that Kepler had done -- and he continued to believe that the orbits of the planets are circles, despite Kepler having shown otherwise.

Newton worked from Kepler's laws of planetary motion because these were regularities that had been found in the planets' motions -- and working from these was a lot easier than working directly from the planets' observed positions.

There are lots and lots of fundamentalists who believe that the Universe is only 6000 years old, simply because that's what the genealogies in the Bible add up to.

Dr Rick

Disproving his position is like trying to nail jello to a tree: it's easy, but nothing sticks.

Rick