Creation vs. Evolution

[Mark T]

Could you send me the journals, or should I ask TM?

 

[Pupik]

I'm going to celebrate Darwin 200 by using a screwdriver today.

 

[TheCracker]

I'm going to celebrate Darwin by evolving ever so slightly today.

 

[Touring Mars]

I'm going to celebrate Darwin by evolving ever so slightly today.

Could you send me the journals, or should I ask TM?

Done 👍 Also, if you didn't know already, you can access Darwin's complete works free online here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

 

[Mark T]

Done 👍 Also, if you didn't know already, you can access Darwin's complete works free online here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

That should keep me busy for a few months. Thanks.

 

[Sureboss]

One thing I didn't realise (re: human evolution) was that Neanderthals had bigger brains than us.

 

[livemusic]

Done 👍 Also, if you didn't know already, you can access Darwin's complete works free online here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

I was talking to a co-worker about this website and he told me Hermann Blumenau (my hometown founder) was a friend of Darwin. I searched about it and turns out it was actually Fritz Müller, who came to live in Blumenau a couple of years after its foundation, that supported Darwin and exchanged letters with him. Müllerian mimicry was named after him. I never knew this.

Also, thanks for the link, I'll definitely spend some time reading it. 👍

 

[Stevisiov]

. I am choosing to celebrate by carrying an image of Darwin in my wallet.

I'm going to celebrate Darwin 200 by using a screwdriver today.

I'm going to celebrate Darwin by evolving ever so slightly today.

I think it might be appropriate today for me to celebrate by removing myself from the genepool.

 

[KSaiyu]

I was surprised by this, considering as the article points out our relatively secular society:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news...win-but-are-still-skeptical-of-evolution.html

LONDON—On Thursday, February 12, a large crowd gathered around a huge iced fruitcake topped with 200 candles in a park in central Shrewsbury to sing "Happy Birthday, Dear Charlie." The honoree? Shrewsbury's most famous son: Charles Darwin....


....Proud though Britain may be for having produced such a famous, pre-eminent, albeit controversial, scientist, Darwin's theory of evolution is a hard sell here—even though the United Kingdom is a rather secular society where church attendance has fallen to negligible numbers. A January ComRes poll taken for the religious think tank Theos found that 51 percent of Britons say that evolution alone can't explain complex life, and 32 percent believe that life on Earth began within the past 10,000 years—a basic tenet of creationism.

While disdainful of the Darwin celebrations, calling them an effort by atheists and humanists "to give Charles Darwin a sainthood," Randall Hardy, spokesman for Creation Research UK, claims that efforts to promote Darwin and natural selection in Britain have backfired because a growing number of Britons now embrace creationism. Perhaps that's why proponents of creationism and intelligent design have scheduled only a handful of relatively low-profile counterevents—though Hardy's group has a lecture set for Saturday night at a Shrewsbury church. Bloomfield agrees that it's "a fair point that a good proportion of society does not accept evolutionary biology" and that much of the public, regardless of personal views, has only a "very shallow" understanding of the theory.

While the sceptism for Evolution being the sole process of complex life is understandable, I can't believe almost a third of the people polled thought life began less than 10000 years ago.

 

[wfooshee]

Most folks simply cannot process timelines longer than a few generations. The whole issue is almost as simple as that. There's yesterday, last week, and grandparents' time. Anything beyond that is simply FOREVER. By being unable to grasp the time scale involved, they are unable to grasp anything else about natural selection as an agent of evolution. And since Time can't really be that big and unimaginable, there's no reason to imagine that things actually change if given enough time. You simply can't give them enough time, you see?

Completely non sequitor, I saw a History Channel show the other day called "The Universe," which tries to bring heady astronomical sciences to the common man (yet perhaps carries the simplification just a tad too far.) The subject was the sun, and how it can produce so much heat and energy. In the time before nuclear reactions were understood, or even imagined, science wondered what the sun used for fuel to burn so hot. The distance to the sun was known, its size was known, but nothing to produce that much energy was known. It was calculated that if the sun were made of burning firewood which could somehow be oxidized sufficiently, it would burn out in approximately 6,000 years.

It struck me as odd hearing that at the time, that 6,000 is the magic number that is supposedly the age of the Earth, according to some.

Coincidence? I think not. Let's call it PROOF!!!!!!


(See, I can be as good a scientist as the next guy!!!! )

 

[Touring Mars]

I was talking to a co-worker about this website and he told me Hermann Blumenau (my hometown founder) was a friend of Darwin. I searched about it and turns out it was actually Fritz Müller, who came to live in Blumenau a couple of years after its foundation, that supported Darwin and exchanged letters with him. Müllerian mimicry was named after him. I never knew this.

Cool 👍 I was almost a victim of such mimicry, when I was on a field trip collecting grasshoppers (by hand) but had evolved to mimic the colour of wasps...

While the sceptism for Evolution being the sole process of complex life is understandable, I can't believe almost a third of the people polled thought life began less than 10000 years ago.

Most folks simply cannot process timelines longer than a few generations. The whole issue is almost as simple as that.

I agree, and I don't think that the fact that alot of people think that life is relatively "young" is an endorsement of creationism. I know plenty of people who don't (or didn't until recently) know how old the Earth is, let alone how old the Universe is, and they are nowhere near what I'd call a creationist.

 

[Sureboss]

A poll taken for a religious think tank. About as much accuracy as Andy Cole.

 

[homeforsummer]

Most folks simply cannot process timelines longer than a few generations. The whole issue is almost as simple as that. There's yesterday, last week, and grandparents' time. Anything beyond that is simply FOREVER.

I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head there.

If the scale and age of the universe don't completely boggle your mind, then you aren't thinking about them hard enough. Just take a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo. You can try and try again to get your head around what appears to be a fairly crummy, blurry photo, but it's almost impossible to imagine the scale involved - each of those tiny swirls is a whole other galaxy, millions of light years into deep space, many of which are probably vastly bigger than our own, containing billions of stars and many more billions of planets. It's hard to comprehend, isn't it?

Same goes for time. In the average 80-odd year lifespan of a human, so much can happen. Now think how far back 1000 years seems, over ten of your own life-spans. Or 2000 years to the time when Jesus was supposedly around. Around 25 of your life-times ago. The Pyramids? 5000 years old.

9000 years? The oldest playable flute, from China, has been carbon-dated at that age.

What about 10,000 years? If you're 80, that's 125 times the amount of time you've been on Earth. It's getting quite hard to fathom already, just think how much could have happened in that time. In fact, 10k years ago is when the Ice age was supposed to have ended. Ice ages apparently move in 40k to 100k year cycles.

250,000 BC? Earliest remains of a human found in Britain are between 200k and 300k years old.

Now let's pick another number back in time... the extinction of the Dinosaurs, maybe? 65 million years ago if I remember correctly. When 2000 years ago is hard to consider, then 65 million years ago is pretty hard on the grey matter, isn't it?

How about we up the ante? Oldest rock on Earth. How old? 4.3 billion years.

The Earth itself is apparently 4.5 billion years old.

The Universe? Significantly older than 13 billion years. Or translated back to lifetimes, 162,500,000. One hundred and sixty-five and a half million lifetimes ago. If someone had that many dollars, you'd say they were very rich. Well in whole lifetimes, it's impossible to comprehend.

So in a rather long-winded and roundabout way, this is sort of why it's not hard to understand why so many people seem to presume that we've only been around for 10,000 years.

And yes, my mind has once again been boggled by figures such as those above

 

[KSaiyu]

....then inevitably you come to the question: how many of those that can't grasp the numbers find it entirely believable that 5 loaves and 2 fishes fed 5000 people.

That was a great post by the way, and that picture is just....insane.

 

[wfooshee]

I know plenty of people who don't (or didn't until recently) know how old the Earth is, let alone how old the Universe is, and they are nowhere near what I'd call a creationist.

I agree with that, but I think I was going for the corrolary, that creationists (in general) can't wrap their heads around the timelines, and use that to reinforce their belief system. Sort of, "Nothing can actually be that old, so that leaves my explanation as the valid one."

It's orders of magnitude that gets people crying. Even when you think you're getting somewhere, somebody drops in with the concept of cosmological decades. Now that will have you wanting some medicine and a nap!

 

[Mark T]

That hubble telescope picture is awesome and the one thing I find harder to grasp other than the quantity of galaxies is the distance between them. From that picture I can imagine a rocket taking a leisurely trip to each galaxy with ease.

 

[Stevisiov]

I think its one of the reasons I think this is such a great clip is it tries to help people picture these large numbers. I am sure you have all seen it

 

[homeforsummer]

Fantastic find on that vid 👍 It's exactly what I was getting at with my post, and one of the best reasons why astronomy is so mind-boggling and fascinating.

Incidentally, that picture of the Ultra Deep Field photo I posted was just a small section of the photo too. The full image that you can see in the vid can be found on Google images.

Re: the 47bn light year figure in the clip, that's just the size of the visible universe. There is a high chance that light from even greater distances hasn't even reached us yet.

That hubble telescope picture is awesome and the one thing I find harder to grasp other than the quantity of galaxies is the distance between them. From that picture I can imagine a rocket taking a leisurely trip to each galaxy with ease.

Not just the distances between them laterally, but also in terms of relative distance. One galaxy in the image may be millions of light years farther away, yet look the same size as it could contain millions more stars.

 

[KSaiyu]

That video....I remember when I was space mad as a kid thinking how big and far away the moon must be.

Clicking on that original picture I'm blown away, then googleing it and seeing the full size pic floors me, and finally watching that video is just awe-inspiring. When you realize that's just one field of view of space....just amazing.

 

[homeforsummer]

That's one of the most amazing things about that image. When you look up at the stars in an area with no light pollution and it's really clear, you can see millions of them. Scientists with massive telescopes can see even more than that. And yet, for the UDF, they picked a tiny area that even they considered dark, with no starlight whatsoever... and after repeated exposures, they revealed all those galaxies. From a dark section of space. And think how many other dark sections there are. Or not-so-dark ones. Or fairly bright ones. And behind all those there'll be more galaxies like those in the image.

It's when you consider how many billions of galaxies there must be, and without getting all X-Files on you, that you realise how likely it is that there are other lifeforms somewhere out there. The probability is too great for there not to be.

 

[Sureboss]

Another figure I like to use to quantify the distance from our galaxy to the next nearest one (Andromeda) is the fact that Andromeda and Milky Way are heading towards each other at a rate of about 300,000mph, yet it will take a few billion years for the collision to happen!

 

[homeforsummer]

Another figure I like to use to quantify the distance from our galaxy to the next nearest one (Andromeda) is the fact that Andromeda and Milky Way are heading towards each other at a rate of about 300,000mph, yet it will take a few billion years for the collision to happen!

Not only that, but when the "collision" happens, there's unlikely to be many actual collisions as the passing stars will still be hundreds and even thousands of light years away from each other.

 

[livemusic]

Was this posted already? What do you think of it?

 

[Touring Mars]

Good stuff, the music is a bit over the top, though

I watched an excellent documentary last night, another part of Channel 4's series "Christianity: A History", entitled "God And The Scientists", presented by Prof Colin Blakemore. In this programme, Blakemore charted the birth and rise of evidence-based science and how the church has responded to the challenges posed by emerging facts, from the persecution of Galileo to modern day Creationists.

As part of the show, Blakemore visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA and had a brief discussion with Dr. Jason Lisle, astrophysicist and a prominent speaker for the Answers In Genesis movement, but for me the highlight was Blakemore's discussions with Brother Guy Consolmagno , the Vatican's chief astronomer. Blakemore also spoke (briefly) with Richard Dawkins for another Dawkins soundbite on Intelligent Design.

For me, the most revealing aspect of the programme was the stark contrast between the two viewpoints of Consolmagno and Lisle, two Christians with very different interpretations of the value and meaning of science, which are as far apart as Dawkins (an atheist) and Lisle. Blakemore's assertion that "There is no point in science if it can only be right if it agrees with The Bible" was a damning side-swipe at Lisle's brand of creation science, whereas (perhaps expectedly) Consolmagno had a more philosophical viewpoint. He asserts that The Old Testament was not and never will be a work of science, but, perhaps in common with modern day science, was an attempt at putting life into a meaningful context consistent with the way things were understood at the time. As such, Consolmagno sees no problem accomodating new scientific facts as they emerge.

I got the impression that Consolmagno doesn't consider science to "contradict" God simply because it contradicts The Old Testament (as Creationists like Lisle think) but suggests that science is the modern way to revealing/understanding the nature of God - Blakemore extended the idea to suggest that science is merely displacing religious texts as the 'method of choice' for understanding the true nature of the world. (Clearly, Blakemore and Dawkins go a bit further and disagree with Consolmagno that there even is a God to be understood...)

The difference in opinion between Brother Consolmagno and Dr. Lisle clearly demonstrates that how much science challenges one's faith is not a function of the strength of one's faith, but a function of how much you value science and the scientific method. As a result, I would say that the true definition of "Creationist" is "anti-Scientist", and that religious faith per se is not the defining characteristic of a Creationist. Therefore, is it perhaps less sensible to attempt to promote science via militant atheism than to persuade people of a religious persuasion that science is not a threat to their faith?

 

[Sureboss]

I watched a BBC documentary on Virgin On Demand, Horizon: Can we build a star on earth?. I found it fascinating in the search for Nuclear Fusion, with the two methods Laser Fusion and the other one ()...With the exec of the laser fusion lab in the states predicting a successful fusion within 2-3 years!

Had time to go through a couple of those journals, TM, the Ayala article Darwin's greatest Discovery: Design without designer was fantastic. The one on dinosaur evolution was good too, but a little heavy on the technical jumbo!

Also find it interesting that in the Neanderthal Genome they share the same FOXP2 gene, the one which makes us speak. Whereas we differ on this gene from chimps.

.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7886477.stm

 

[Touring Mars]

I watched a BBC documentary on Virgin On Demand, Horizon: Can we build a star on earth?. I found it fascinating in the search for Nuclear Fusion, with the two methods Laser Fusion and the other one ()...With the exec of the laser fusion lab in the states predicting a successful fusion within 2-3 years!

I was shocked yesterday when my Dad - who almost never watches TV - commented that he saw this and really enjoyed it. It was a great programme, easily reaching the typically high standard that we've come to expect from BBC's Horizon series. Prof. Brian Cox has made quite a few docs recently, usually about the nature of time, but this one was particularly fascinating, since the issue is of such vital importance to our future lives. I wonder if the oil companies, oil-rich Saudi sheiks and gas-rich Russian oligarchs were watching this, thinking of ways to stop them from destroying the fossil fuel industry! (*checks ebay to see who is currently bidding on those polonium samples*)

Had time to go through a couple of those journals, TM, the Ayala article Darwin's greatest Discovery: Design without designer was fantastic. The one on dinosaur evolution was good too, but a little heavy on the technical jumbo!

Great 👍 Francisco Ayala is a fantastic spokesman and it is a great article. The dinosaur evolution paper is very technical, and I openly admit that I love it purely because of the figures!

Also find it interesting that in the Neanderthal Genome they share the same FOXP2 gene, the one which makes us speak. Whereas we differ on this gene from chimps.

.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7886477.stm

The Neanderthal Genome promises to throw up plenty of surprises and shocks (depending on your "worldview" ) Arguably, we're more interested in what the neanderthal genome will tell us about ourselves than it will say about our extinct 'cousins', but either way, the results will hopefully be of tremendous value.

 

[mindwise]

I thought i'd share this for the ones that haven't yet read this:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2009) — A major mystery about the origins of life has been resolved. According to a study published in the journal Nature, two Université de Montréal scientists have proposed a new theory for how a universal molecular machine, the ribosome, managed to self-assemble as a critical step in the genesis of all life on Earth.

read the full article on sciencedaily here

 

[Touring Mars]

I've had a look at the actual paper and I have to admit, it's way over my head The article you've linked to, however, is a very helpful and neat summary - the implications of this work couldn't be more relevant to this thread, and no doubt it will have the "irreducible complexity" folks choking on their cornflakes.

 

[Tenacious D]

A key ingredient in religion is faith. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don't have faith, you're not religious. There are two approaches to the discovery of truth. One is rational, the other is spiritual. The rational approach deals in observation, repeatability, testing, and empirical sampling of truth. Spirituality deals with introspection - it attempts to extract truth from emotion. Rationality never actually has to be tied directly to truth. In matters where we use rationality, we accept that truth is not known, but rather, approximated. Spirituality requires faith to tie it to truth, because it isn't an approximation of truth. Faith is the leap that ties your discoveries from your analysis of your emotions to truth. Without faith, spiritual introspection is useless for discovering anything but your own mental state.

Faith is by definition a belief in something irrational. Since faith is required for religion, and faith is inherently irrational, religion is inherently irrational.

I know this is a bit off topic, but while all that was very thoughtful, the bold part was questionable. This being the net and all, and not wanting to waste much time, this is what Dictionary.com has for the definition of irrational.

ir⋅ra⋅tion⋅al
   /ɪˈræʃənl/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [i-rash-uh-nl]
–adjective
1. without the faculty of reason; deprived of reason.
2. without or deprived of normal mental clarity or sound judgment.
3. not in accordance with reason; utterly illogical: irrational arguments.
4. not endowed with the faculty of reason: irrational animals.

I didn't think math definitions were needed here.

The issue is how you couch the term, because irrational has the connotation of "crazy" or "insane." Used gently, I could see it, possibly, but let's try this in another subject, Darwinian evolution. It's foundation is the hypothesis that all life sprang from lifeless primordial substances, and through constant accidental genetic improvements, evolved into ever more complex and capable forms until we finally arrived at Barack Obama and Scarlett Johansson. The problem with it is twofold.

• It defies known principles of science
• The evidence for it is almost entirely lacking

Primordial goo couldn't have produced anything of ever growing complexity, because the environment would have broken down anything resembling complex proteins or enzymes, never mind RNA or DNA. Your own body is constantly rotting and dying from within. It's corrosive to itself. The only thing that keeps it going and living is the fact that the body constantly repairs itself and cleans out the damage and decay. So in order for life to have evolved from non-living matter, you have to assume that the entire environment of the planet was constantly building, protecting, and even improving the molecular development of chemicals from non-organic to organic to living. In short, you have to assume that from the very beginning, the Earth itself was a living thing, and worked itself to produce life.

The fossil record also fails to support Darwinian evolution because it presents life in discreet stages, with no transitions between living things. There is no T Rex grandaddy you can place before T Rex, and a T Rex grandson after him. The nature of fossils found in the fossil record is the basis for the hypothesis of punctuated equillibrium, or "the hopeful monster." However, it requires some sort of drastic environmental changes to justify the sudden appearance of countless species, and the fossil record doesn't give any indication of that either.

Both hypotheses try to explain the world as best they can, and both come up quite a bit short. In essence, they both are forced to make leaps of faith, because the evidence is just lacking, to draw the conclusions they do.

I'm not sure "irrational" is the word either of us would use for these notions, although there are times I think scientists are crazy. Such as the rabid spite from the scientific community heaped on so-called cold fusion, despite the fact that evidence indicates something unusual is going on that can't be explained from known electro-chemical reactions. And in fact, energy levels point to the possibility of some unknown atomic reactions taking place in some of them, with the release of weak amounts of radiation.

Having been a student of science for some years now, I can assure you that Science is it's own dogma, as entrenched and reactionary as anything you can point to in the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. And yes, this I would call irrational. But I sincerely doubt that anyone has or will use that term to describe any scientific school of thought, because science is all about being logical and rational. At least that's what they say.

As for T Mars' post above, I wonder how much longer it will be until Obama sponsors a "Take a terrorist to lunch" initiative...

Edit: one more thing. I just watched the Glenn Becvk piece above. We need more Glenn Becks in this country, otherwise, the Obama maniacs are going to have their way, until the dollar spontaneously combusts from lack of value, and then we all go down.

 

[Duke]

[moderator] I moved this post to the appropriate thread. [/moderator]

...let's try this in another subject, Darwinian evolution. It's foundation is the hypothesis that all life sprang from lifeless primordial substances, and through constant accidental genetic improvements, evolved into ever more complex and capable forms until we finally arrived at Barack Obama and Scarlett Johansson. The problem with it is twofold.

• It defies known principles of science
• The evidence for it is almost entirely lacking

Primordial goo couldn't have produced anything of ever growing complexity, because the environment would have broken down anything resembling complex proteins or enzymes, never mind RNA or DNA.

[snip]

The fossil record also fails to support Darwinian evolution because it presents life in discreet stages, with no transitions between living things.

[Duke] I suggest you read through this thread, daunting a task as that may seem. Everything you have written about this above is wishful thinking at best, and downright incorrect scientifically. [/Duke]