Pheobe Debates The Theory of Evolution

Original scene from the show... Friends. ^ | NA | NA

[Mr.Atos]

I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...

Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!

Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.

Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.

Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.

Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!

Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?

Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!

Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!

Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?

Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?

[PatrickHenry]

I want you to tell me straight to my internet face once again that I personally contrived a thread, a reason, a trap, etc...or, as you say, "So the "evo trap" disguised as a bible thread worked as intended."

That's what I thought. And I'm willing to overlook it and never bring it up again.

[CobaltBlue]

We will not discriminate against any poster or group of people on our off the forum, living or dead, on the basis of religious belief, sexual orientation, gender, age or scientific beliefs.

I handle the occasional civil rights case (I have a doozy now, where the boss liked to drop trou all the time - I've got a photo of him bending over where you can see everything up to his tonsils.)

As someone battle scarred from being in the trenches, I know that there are hundreds of thousands of cases trying to define what "discriminate against" means.

Does it mean that you can't tell stupid jokes, like the ones Aric posted upstream that made ALS mad?

[CobaltBlue]

May I make a suggestion? How about posting the proposed contract on a completely new thread, presumably in the Smokey Backroom, so that we can discuss it without reverberations of any other thread distracting us?

[Jeremiah Jr]

An amazing feature of Free Republic is... You can watch the tares being bundled, in real time.

Torah will guard you against Jezebel
Proverbs 7

[CobaltBlue]

I can't really follow the arguments all the way back in time, and don't really want to, either.

Too far behind at work.

I don't see any reason for Aric2000 to be telling jokes about St. Peter and the pearly gates at this juncture, nor Junior's story about the blonde in the red convertible. Both seem unnecessarily provocative to me.

But I am not following the thread all that closely.

[AndrewC]

No, as I understand mutations there is never stability, per se.

Gee, are you now arguing on my side? Read what I have written. That little realization then makes one wonder why anyone could think that something complex could ever evolve. Simulation programs that "prove" evolution always have a non-moving target as the goal. They never have a varying goal. For instance the target chosen by one is "Methinks it is like a weasel" which never changes, not:
methinks it is like a aardvark,
weasels are like otters,
methinks it is like a vessel,
wethinks tis like a weasel,
as the goal at various times.

Having a varying goal results in chaos for these programs.

[Right Wing Professor]

Because if you start from a slightly different part of the surface, you may end up in a totally different place, if you're on the opposite site of a saddle. A lot of speciation is probably a result of allopatry; you get some degree of geographical isolation and the two populations diverge; e.g. humans on the savannah, monkeys in the forest.

[exmarine]

It's just an update to sentiments that have been expressed by humanity since long before Darwin came on the scene.

Yes, of course. There have always been people who did not know God, and the hearts of those people despaired to find some meaning or purpose or hope in life. But, alas, without God, there is none. Neitszche certainly saw life for it truly is when it is denuded of the eternal and universals, and he despaired! The fact is that all humans beings have a yearning for fulfillment and wonder. Little children have a sense of wonder, but once they grow up (if they ponder life at all) that sense of wonder disappears and is replaced by loneliness, emptiness, longing for fulfillment. Many people without God seek that fulfillment in money, sex, drugs, alcohol, adrenalin, food, etc., but for a human being, enough of anything is never enough, becuase outside material stimulus cannot fulfill that inner yearning for fulfillment. God is the only one who can.

[CobaltBlue]

That little realization then makes one wonder why anyone could think that something complex could ever evolve.

Not when I consider the truly immense length of time involved. Compare it to the movement of continents and the formation and erosion of mountains, that's the kind of time scale we're looking at.

Having a varying goal results in chaos for these programs.

We can't even properly model weather in real time yet, so I don't expect to be able to model evolution in four dimensions yet.

[Right Wing Professor]

You do not create information by killing the individuals carrying it.

Take a million random numbers of 20 digits.

Kill all the numbers that don't contain at least 6 sixes.

The remaining numbers clearly contain more information; anyone looking at the numbers will notice that there are a lot of sixes; they will probably conclude all numbers with fewer than 6 sixes have been eliminated

There was no information in the initial set

There is information in the second set.

We have therefore created information purely by eliminating things.

[exmarine]

One-off side-effects like that happen all the time. Written languages are one such effect, finding beauty in a sunset is quite likely another.

Sounds like another unscientific "just so" story to me. Got any REAL scientific evidence to back back up your contention that the aesthetic sense is genetic?

There's no particular reason that you should prefer ice cream to rice cakes - a million years ago, there were neither rice cakes nor ice cream - but you do, and there's a good general explanation for why you would be expected to choose ice cream over rice cakes.

Comparing ice cream to aesthetic feelings? Where do you get this stuff?

[Right Wing Professor]

Hah! I'm uninterested in modeling in less than 30 dimensions.

With 30 dimensions I could evolve an elephant!

[AndrewC]

if you're on the opposite site of a saddle.

The objects either started on opposite sides of the saddle(they are different) or they were on the unstable part of the saddle at "initiation".

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Joy is right.

Maybe this will become known as the enema thread.

[AndrewC]

Not when I consider the truly immense length of time involved.

The age of the universe is not even a drop in the bucket considering the "goal". All of the simulations use an unvarying target. Move the target and solutions do not converge.

[conservababeJen]

Does it mean that you can't tell stupid jokes, like the ones Aric posted upstream that made ALS mad?

Perhaps if it were a CATHOLIC joke, you wouldn't find it so stupid?

I know a ton of em but have better taste/judgment than to post them..........What's even worse is that the Fundamentalist joke was directed AT a Fundamentalist (he went out of his way to FReepmail ALS that joke). How would you feel about me (an adversary) directing Catholic joke to you in FReepmail?

How can you logically see nothing wrong with this?

Does anyone here doubt for a single moment that if I posted Catholic jokes (in this atmosphere) I wouldn't immediately be labeled a Catholic basher?

Aric's motivation is in question. Just as you would question mine in the reverse.

I remember a few weeks back where ALS was called a Catholic basher for phonetically spelling "none" as "nun", when nothing was meant by it besides informal web linguistics (that many people here use with assorted words).

[Nebullis]

Simulation programs that "prove" evolution always have a non-moving target as the goal. They never have a varying goal.

For lurkers, simply google on evolutionary or genetic programming with dynamic fitness.

[js1138]

We will not discriminate against any poster or group of people on our off the forum, living or dead, on the basis of religious belief, sexual orientation, gender, age or scientific beliefs.

We will not call evolutionists Marxist (etc.) or make them feel unwelcome

I have no problem with myself attempting to abide by the contrace, but I have a question. One of the issues that begins and fuels flame wars is the assertion that holding certain scientific beliefs leads to immoral behavior, and that failure to hold certain religious beliefs leads to immoral behavior. Does this contract take this accusation off the table? If not, I'm afraid the contract is toothless.

[CobaltBlue]

He's saying that what tastes good to you has more calories and other nutritious things than that which tastes bad. Ripe fruit tastes better than green fruit. Fresh meat tastes better than rotten meat.

Aesthetics are in large part driven by physiology.

The attraction of a man for a young healthy woman with curves where a woman should be curved is in large part due to the fact that she is more reproductively fit.

Same for the attraction of a woman for a taller man with broad shoulders, square jawline, long legs, etc.

[Right Wing Professor]

Crossbills (a kind of finch) are like this. There are apparently at least nine very similar species.

The red crossbill is a kind of finch, that lives in coniferous forests in the Northern Hemisphere. As its name suggests, it has crossed mandibles, that it uses, tweezer fashion, to extract seeds from cones. The mandibles are highly specialized, apparently because for any given species of conifer, it's important to have 'tweezers' of exactly the right size and shape. Trouble is, if two crossbill types overlap in range, they may interbreed and produce intermediate hybrids which can't easily extract either kind of seed. Therefore there is strong selection pressure not to interbreed, and apparently the crossbills have evolved behavioral sexual selection to avoid interbreeding; it's probably largely based on songs and calls, which seem to be the most plastic element of the bird phenotype.

If you do a careful examination of the bill, you can figure which crossbill type you have, but it's very difficult in the field.

A nice link

http://research.amnh.org/ornithology/crossbills/nathist.html