Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory

Gallup.com ^ | 11/19/04 | Gallup

[GarySpFc]

I am speaking of the official positions of both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, which comprise about 1.3 billion of the world's 2 billion Christians. I am sure there are Protestant denominations that accept the TOE, too. Creationism is a fringe movement among Christians.

Wrong again! Firstly, not all of the Catholic Church accepts the evolution model. The majority of Christians fighting evolution in our schools just happen to be Catholics.
Secondly, you are also wrong about the Orthodox Church. I am married to a Russian lady, and I can tell you for a fact the majority of the ROC believes in Creationism.

[Dimensio]

Evolutionists resist Creation, since it would presuppose God,

Not all who accept evolution are atheists.

The resistance to Creation is based in its total lack of scientific backing. Which "Creaiton" story should I even assume in the first place? Why put forth just the Genesis account, what's wrong with a Hindu story, or the Hoopi indians?

[Modernman]

I want to see one species "re"produce and out pop a different species.

Species are a continuum more than they are dividing lines. A population evolves gradually until it can no longer interbreed with the parent species. There are plenty of fuzzy lines, of course.

Small, gradual changes over time are the mechanism by which a population of one species evolves into another species.

I'm genuinely curious. Have humans ever successfully mated with apes?

I don't think so. I doubt we would be close enough for even a hybrid to be born (unlike, say, lions and tigers, which can mate to create a usually infertile hybrid)

[Junior]

The vast majority of creationists on these threads are horribly scientifically illiterate. However, it never stops them from adding their two-cents worth.

[hawkaw]

Agreed.

[narby]

I'm not married to the theory the way some people are either. I can therefore look at it skeptically and demand that those scientists promoting it prove it rather than assume it without undermining my worldview.

The reason I go after Creationism is because it's self destructive. See some of my other posts, but the short version is that it forces many people who participate in these Darwinism/Creationism fights into discussing whether God exists at all. When this happens in a Government school setting, as Creationists are demanding to happen, it guarantees that some children will be driven away from God. This is an avoidable tragedy.

Believing in a 6000 year creation or miraculous "poof" creation is not central to any religious denomination I know of. It's just not that big a deal, and religious people making a big deal out of it damages their own interests.

[clyde asbury]

I have a problem with the giant leap from believing in small genetic changes over time to believing that members of one species get together, procreate, and produce something that is not also part of that species.

Mules, donkeys, cross-breeding of plant species...

Small genetic changes over billions of years = dramatic leaps.

I'm genuinely curious. Have humans ever successfully mated with apes?
Democratic Underground

[gdani]

I want to see one species "re"produce and out pop a different species.

Witnessing that would be proof *against* evolution.

[Modernman]

Wrong again! Firstly, not all of the Catholic Church accepts the evolution model. The majority of Christians fighting evolution in our schools just happen to be Catholics.

Shrug. This just goes back to your assertion that anyone who accepts the TOE is an atheist. Like I said, the majority of Christians belong to denominations that accept the TOE, in one way or another. The Pope's position is basically that the TOE does not contradict the Bible but since the Vatican's job is not to decide scientific issues, the question of whether the TOE is correct should be left to the scientists. The Vatican does not demand that its flock take a position on scientific issues.

Secondly, you are also wrong about the Orthodox Church. I am married to a Russian lady, and I can tell you for a fact the majority of the ROC believes in Creationism.

You need to define your terms. When you say Creationism, do you mean that the world is 6000 years old and that everything was created in 7 days or do you mean that God is, ultimately, the creator but that everything came about through a billions-year long process?

[Doctor Stochastic]

We can only speculate as to why two young men at Columbine High School gave up all hope and went on a rampage.

Perhaps they heard voices. That's why Joan of Arc killed so many.

[clyde asbury]

Winning the debate becmes a rhetorical game, and accomplishes nothing except an ego gratification


Put down the hemlock, Socrates.

[Lurking Libertarian]

want to see one species "re"produce and out pop a different species. I'm serious. I want to see that. It's one of my biggest problems with this theory. I don't think it has ever happened, no one has ever seen it happen, no one has ever even claimed to see it happen, no one even knows HOW it could happen. So if people choose not to believe in miracles because they've never seen one and don't know how it would happen, macroevolution is a miracle.

Speciation has been observed both in the laboratory and in the wild. See, for example, this article or this one.

[DameAutour]

According to the website you cited, there are only a few "ring species" and the phenomenon is rare (and in none of the examples cited, is there the claim that these "two" species CANnot interbreed, only that they either do not or do so rarely).

But this phenomenon is responsible for the existence of every single species on the planet. Just how much time was this supposed to take?

"Their formation requires unusual geographic situations, in which a species can expand around a geographic barrier through a continuous ring of suitable habitat. The range expansion must occur slowly enough that the two expanding fronts have time to diverge before they meet on the other side of the barrier, and the size of the barrier must be large compared to the distance that individuals disperse."

This cannot explain the existence of all species on the planet, plant and animal.

[DameAutour]

Can they or can they not interbreed? Not do they or do they not, CAN they or CAN they not?

Probably the biggest turnoff people have with your theory is the ideas that humans (really the only species people care about), came from apes. Humans and apes cannot interbreed and prior to Darwin, no one had any reason to believe they ever had. The idea that humans came from any kind of ape seems absurd, unless you seriously undervalue humanity.

And every time a new discovery is made, a new "ancestor" of man, it is really either a man or an ape. It is man or not man. There is no in-between man who could reproduce with apes and humans.

[DameAutour]

Lions and tigers are both felines. It is "cat" and "cat", I'm looking for "cat" and "not cat". I'm assuming such exists. A population evolves gradually until it can no longer interbreed with the parent species.

That is what I am looking for. The population that could interbreed with the parent species and the one immediately following that couldn't.

[GarySpFc]

Why Kansas Catholics Opposed
The Teaching of Evolution
By Jack Cashill, Ph.D.


Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs.

Willfully or otherwise, the science educators misconstrued the Pope's position. This disturbed the Catholics at Topeka to be sure, but it did not surprise them. What has surprised them, shocked them really, are the dismissive editorials by their fellow Catholics who understand the Pope's position only superficially and who understand the science educators' not at all.

For the record, Pope John Paul II and the U.S. Bishops have no objection to certain theories of evolution as long as they allow for God's creation of the world and the special creation of man. This is a shrewd posture on the part of the Pope as it allows for the Church to adapt to new scientific discoveries without a challenge to the faith.

Unfortunately, the Church's position does not wash with evolutionary biologists of any repute or ambition. They may avoid conflict with the Vatican by either ignoring or misquoting the Pope, but in fact, Catholic teaching is antithetical to their own, and they know it. A little background here is in order. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This elegant and timely work made two basic claims: One is that living things experience what Darwin called "variations" or what we call "mutations"--genetic changes that occur randomly. The second is that a process he called "natural selection" preserves favorable variations and rejects harmful ones.

The best evidence Darwin could cite for this theory was the breeding of domestic animals. These obvious changes within a species--called microevolution--no one could deny then, and no one denies today, certainly not the Church, nor the much maligned Kansas Board of Education.

The question Darwin had to ask himself--the tough question--was whether this theory could account for macroevolution, the presumed bridge from one species to another and the mechanism he thought responsible for the vast diversity of life.

Darwin and his philosophical heirs answer an unequivocal "Yes." Richard Dawkins, today's most influential evolutionist, describes natural selection as "a blind, unconscious, automatic process" that is "the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life."

That's a quote. The explanation. All life. What room does that leave for, well, say, God? Not much.

"In the evolutionary pattern of thought," said Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, "there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved."

No need. No room. And Huxley's sentiment is the rule, not the exception. The renowned biologist Stephen Jay Gould praises Darwinism as "a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution." Darwin made it possible," boasts Richard Dawkins, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

These are their own words. As to the inescapable ramifications of Darwinism, distinguished Cornell University Professor Will Provine, evolutionary biologist and neo-Darwinian, happily cites the impossibility of either free will or life after death.

The larger philosophy is often called naturalism, nature is all that there is; or materialism, matter is all that there is. In its most extreme forms, scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the terror of Nazi eugenics and the tyranny of communism. Wrote Marx to Engels of Darwin's The Origin of Species, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

Pope John Paul II has preached often against materialism and specifically so in an evolutionary context. Aware of this, the Catholics at the Topeka hearings objected not only to the undeniable connection between today's science establishment and the eugenics movement, but also to the implicit materialism of the proposed science standards themselves.

For all its harsh consequences, materialism would present a real challenge to the faith only if its own particular creation myth, Darwinism, was irrefutable. But Darwinism is hardly that. There is, after all, no evidence of existing transitional species as Darwin presumed there ought to be. None. There's no hard evidence of the same in the fossil record. Most species haven't changed at all. The major animal groups did not emerge gradually as Darwin predicted, but they exploded on to the scene. Nor did they die out gradually as Darwin said they would. Those that vanished, vanished in a geological heartbeat.

It gets worse. In one of his bolder moments, Darwin said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Darwin knew nothing of the electron microscope and cellular biology. His champion, Richard Dawkins, knows a lot. As Dawkins notes, the nucleus of each cell contains more information than all 30 volumes of the encyclopedia Brittanica put together, complex, specific and perfectly ordered.

Richard Dawkins imagines the cell as a Xerox machine, capable, he says, "of copying its own blueprints," but "not capable of springing spontaneously into existence." So picture Dawkins on the brink of infinity, pumping what Darwin called "secretions" from his barely evolved brain, trying desperately to figure how this this wonderfully complex machine came to be. His best guess? No joke: "sheer, unadulterated, miraculous luck." It must have slopped itself together, he surmises, from some imagined chemical soup.

Luck indeed, it's a task scientists have never been able to duplicate in the lab. Not to be outdone, Nobel laureate Frances Crick argues that these first primitive life forms might have come to earth, hang on, in a spaceship sent by a dying alien civilization.

In truth, neither Dawkins nor Crick have a clue where these first cells came from. Neither do their peers. Indeed, when biochemist Michael Behe searched the scientific journals looking for a Darwinian explanation, he found instead "an eerie and complete silence."

Said Darwin , "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent." One wonders how he would feel about utterly whimsical "additions" like spaceships or luck.

Still, America's public school teachers can present this goofiness in class as science but can not even address the rational possibility of a willful, intelligent creation of life. And the editorialists, even the Catholic ones, cheer on this kind of teaching, fearing to be cast among the anti-Darwinian few whom Dawkins calls the "ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked."

Ironically, the loud, spiteful resistance from the establishment bodes well for the future. It is a sign not of confidence but of confusion. It may even portend a genuine shift in the paradigm.

Richard Dawkins himself admits that "the beauty and elegance of biological design" gives us "the illusion of design and planning." But trapped by a lifetime of scornful pride and self-congratulation, he will abandon his weary materialism no more eagerly than the Soviets abandoned theirs.

The very Catholic (9 children) Michael Behe is not so trapped. "Over the past four decades," he writes in the ground breaking book, Darwin's Black Box, "modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell." "The result," he adds, "is a loud, piercing cry of DESIGN." In Behe's opinion, this observation is "as momentous as the observation that the earth goes round the sun."

Try as they might, the science establishment and their friends in the media cannot suppress this kind of news forever.

Jack Cashill, Ph.D., has written and produced an hour long documentary, The Triumph of Design and The Demise of Darwin, in collaboration with Phillip Johnson. Jack is a Fullbright scholar and a regional Emmy Award winner. See Jack Cashill News: America's Conservative Information Resource.

[Socrates1]

Throughout my years of undergraduate and graduate education, I have been taught this "hierarchical view" of theories and laws. As a former biology professor and current teacher of secondary education, I need to know, "What is the difference between a theory and a law?" and more importantly, CAN a theory eventually become a law based on supporting evidence?

snip

Unfortunately I learned it pretty much the same way you did... and didn't really have it corrected until I started digging into the philosophy of science rather recently. The current consensus among philosophers of science seems to be this....

Who are these "current philosophers of science"?

Did they take a poll to reach the consensus?

I too, learned it the "old way". When did these philosophers of science change it?

Since Newtonian Mechanics is invalid (i.e. wrong) at the quantum level, should we rename Newton's Laws?

The language has been corrupted. Rhetoric and sophistry replaces reason and deductive logic, and is used to derail a discussion on semantics rather than on its merits.

This is a phenomena of pseudo-science like "global warming". Consensus trumps facts. Belief trumps reality. Popular opinion formulates policy under the guise of science.

"The world is my idea" - Arthur Schopenhauer

[balrog666]

Probably the biggest turnoff people have with your theory is the ideas that humans (really the only species people care about), came from apes. Humans and apes cannot interbreed and prior to Darwin, no one had any reason to believe they ever had. The idea that humans came from any kind of ape seems absurd, unless you seriously undervalue humanity.

Buy a clue, DimAutour. Humans are apes.

[Doctor Stochastic]

So what is your definition of "species"? Is "species" a property of an entity? If two entities cannot interbreed are they different species? If two entities can interbreed, are they the same? Is there a difference between in vivo, in vitro, and in the wild?

Are lions and tigers different species? Horses and donkeys?

[vikk]

and certainly no one has killed anyone over their belief in religion.

before you talk about the sheer numbers, i think that's more about technology than belief.