spurly

I think the most ridiculous of the creationists are the evolutionary creationists - the people who think that the whole universe just evolved from nothing. That is impossible.

Kevin

Mecha_Dude

spurly, evolutionary theory does not state that "the universe evolved from nothing". Before commenting on something, it is generally considered polite to understand it.

gcameron

This is cosmology, not biology, but I know of no one who believes the universe "evolved from nothing." AFAIK the state of affairs prior to the Big Bang remains a mystery, and any scientist would admit as much.

edit: Of course, "prior to" the Big Bang is a problematic concept anyway, as time and space presumably came about together. Damn my hominid brain, unable to get around these concepts...

Doubting Didymus

Yeah, you're right. That is a very silly position to take.

Usually new agers and the like, with their 'evolving universal energies' are the only people who think this. Biologists and other people who know what the fridge they're talking about are sensible enough to restrict the concept of evolution to replicating entities.

gcameron

But the word itself (with different associated meanings, natch) is not restricted to biology. Stellar evolution, you know.

Doubting Didymus

Stellar evolution is a term that desperately needs to die. Evolution is a word posessed. And its posesed by biological evolution. Its an uncommon enough word for everyone else to agree to give up to biology, in my not so humble opinion. Having other fields using it in totally different ways is just a recipe for confusion.

Coragyps

Most ridiculous? I can now nominate the author of this dreck , with thanks to Porky Pine, wherever he is, for bringing it to my attention.
My favorite so far:

pz

Except, unfortunately, that the other uses predate the biological meaning, and the colloquial meaning has always been closer to "development" than this interesting process that Darwin described. It's also worth noting that Darwin only used the word once in the entire Origin.

Doubting Didymus

Then it is time for the language to evolve. The word evolution is now used almost exclusively to describe biological evolution, which has no usable synonyms to resort to. The other uses of the word evolution can usually be replaced by change, development, progression etc. We need it, and astronomy does not.

Utilitarin good sense, damnit!

pz

Yeah, OK, you try telling the astronomers that they have to change the terminology that they've been using for a couple of centuries. I agree that "stellar progression" would probably be an even better phrase to use than "stellar evolution", but they'd probably throw the utilitarian argument right back in your face.

While you're at it, though, you can also tell those molecular biologists to stop using the term "sequence homology" when they really mean "sequence similarity".