Posted on 03/08/2006 1:45:50 PM PST by rface
Education, church attendance, partisanship related to beliefs......
About half of Americans reject an evolutionary explanation for the origin of humans and believe that God created humans at one time "as is." Those with lower levels of education, those who attend church regularly, those who are 65 and older, and those who identify with the Republican Party are more likely to believe in the biblical view of the origin of humans than are those who do not share these characteristics.
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March 8, 2006
WASHINGTON -- A Gallup Poll released Wednesday suggests about 53 percent of Americans rejects the theory of evolution as the explanation for the origin of humans.
Instead, they believe God created humans at one time "as is," the survey showed.
53%: ... of Americans rejects the theory of evolution as the explanation for the origin of humans.
31%: ..... of respondents said they believe humans evolved, but God guided the process.
1.2%: ..... said they believe the scientific theory of evolution and "God had no part."
(Excerpt) Read more at poll.gallup.com ...
You missed the point. Oh well. And yes there is.
This is a blatant falsehood. The age of the Earth hasn't been revised appreciably in more than half a century, and back when it *was* being revised, it was revised due to discoveries in physics which allowed the age to be more accurately measured, and in no way due to any considerations from or for biology or in order to accomodate any aspect of evolutionary biology. Even from the time of Darwin, evolutionary biology has worked to fit the theory to the facts (including the best estimates of the age of the Earth at the time), and not vice versa.
Please try to learn something about science before you make any more false claims about it.
In the 1700's many lines of evidence led to widespread doubt about the Bible's 6000-year chronology for the age of the Earth. By the mid 1850's estimates of millions of years were suggested, and the Earth has been known to be on the order of a billion or more years old since at least 1911. Calculations of the age of the Earth were converging on the true age as long ago as the 1920's -- for example: 4.0 billion years (Russell, 1921), 3.4 billion years (Rutherford 1929); 4.6 billion years (Meyer 1937); and 3 to 4 billion years (Starik 1937). The number hasn't changed appreciably since the 1940's, when it converged to 4.5 +/- 0.1 billion years due to advances in analytical equipment (thanks to the Manhattan project).
The theory that each species has within it's design (there's that ID thing again) limited abilities built into it's DNA to adapt at the micro level, which is already observed.
This sentence no verb.
What in the heck are you trying to say where? If you think you're saying something about evoutionary biology, no, that's *not* what evolutionary theory says.
Why then, isn't what's observed move to the top of the list
Huh? Could we have that again in English?
and these other theories yet unproven moved downward as they should be?
Actually, that is what happens. That's why the original notions of "ID" which ancient man believed for thousands of years (not just for questions of biology, but also invoked to explain why rain fell today and not tomorrow, why lightning occurred, etc.) moved "downward on the list" as they continued to lack for positive evidence in their favor, while theories of change due to the interaction of natural processes "moved up the list" as vast amounts of evidence continued (and continues) to accumulate in their favor. Today, the evidence for evolutionary change and common ancestry is vast and overwhelming.
Truth, however it falls, should be what governs, not belief, or lack of it.
I agree with you 100% here. And the truth -- the real-world evidence and research -- points overwhelmingly towards evolutionary biology, regardless of how that might clash with some peoples' beliefs to the contrary.
As compared to nuclear physics, which is about 50 years younger.
Compared to genome studies, which are only 10 years old or so.
Climate histories via ice cores, which may be 50 years old.
Aerodynamics, most of which we understood 75 years ago.
Meteorology, which most people will tell you we don't understand yet.
Space flight, 45 years old.
Forensics, much of that is new.
Acoustics, new.
Remote sensing, a few decades old.
Nanotechnology, not here yet.
Micromachines, a few years old.
Semiconductors, 50 years old.
Digital computers, 60 years old.
Metallurgy, around 100 years old and growing still.
I think I could go on awhile yet. Evolution has been withstanding challenges for 150 years. Challenged more vociferously than practically any other science, and yet has more support today due to recent genome information than ever before.
Some think that poking a hole here or there will make it go away. Wrong. A good lawyer-scientist can poke holes in anything. Evolution will not go away until some other hypothesis comes along to explain all those fossils, all that evidence from several scientific disciplines, and explain it all *better* than evolution does. There isn't even a real alternative hypothesis proposed as of yet, so evolution is it.
No I didn't miss the point. Evolution isn't about the Bible. And no it isn't discussed, the best you get out of the Bible is Genesis 1:20 - 25, evolutionary science is about the DETAILS of that. How did the water and the earth bring them forth is the question of evolutionary science, and that simply isn't discussed in the Bible. Very little of what science looks at is discussed in the Bible, fire, farming, architecture, none of these things are discussed in the Bible in any way that's scientifically useful, why is it scientists working in these areas aren't accused of working against the Bible but evolutionary scientists are?
Why not? Carbon dating is FACT? That's news to me. It's a THEORY, and much NEW SCIENCE is proving the theory/ guess on which it's based to be wrong. In fact it clashes with evolutionary theory as well. Claiming a constant in a world that is continuously changing according to evolutionary theories is kind of ... bizarre, don't you think? Again, deep drilling observations.. science...calls it into question. And I'm not arguing from a "God" point of view either. Those that will stand up and shout down this arguement do so only because the alternative points to a younger earth, thesefore God theory, and argue not on points of science, but rather BELIEF. Look it up rather than trying to argue it here. There is simply far too much naterial to cover for it to be made here.
Yeah, but those make up only 1.2% of the population, so not to worry.
Name anyone one you like. In detail please.
There isn't much in science that remains "for it's own sake."
But opposing scientific knowledge plays into the hands of those who want to portray conservatives as Yahoos. Just makes things worse.
This is a really poor description of the actual situation, although I can understand why it might look that way at times.
The biggest problem with your description is that the modern synthesis doesn't "bear much resemblance to Darwinism". Actually, it does, and there are even a lot of passages in "Origin of Species" in which Darwin describes evolution behaving in ways that sound very much like what today is termed "punctuated equilibrium". The primary "departure" of modern evolutionary biology is in the field of DNA studies, but that's just because DNA was unknown in Darwin's time and the additional light and specific mechanisms which are now understood due to our ability to track DNA in action has *added* to Darwin's original contributions, but not contradicted them or required abandoning or significantly changing Darwin's view of evolutionary change.
As for the "sudden events" and other views you mention, there's not as much "disagreement" as you might think in evolutionary biology. It's a debate over the relative *amount* of contributions due to various mechanisms, not over whether they *occur* or not or whether they have a role in evolutionary change. The disputes are over, for example, whether a punctuated equilibrium event contributed heavily to a specific change in a specific lineage, or over whether P.E. is involved in a majority of evolutionary transitions, or in a smaller minority number while other processes contribute more to the majority. In other words, whether it's a frequent and significant contribution to evolutionary history as a whole, or has a more minor role.
In short, it's not that biologists can't even agree on basic principles of evolution, or that they have opposiving views on fundamentals, it's just that there are different opinions on how the details might pan out as all the I's are dotted and all the T's crossed.
Bullshit. Show this 'new science'.
Oh that thing again. The monkey skull fraud. People actually look this stuff up you know.
Hey, did you hear? We have discovered blonde furry lobsters. Must be where white man evolved from....
Almost everything else on your list (except climatology and genomes) can be experimented with, and many spawned from other experimental sciences. Experimental sciences mature much more quickly than non-experimental sciences because they can just go play with their theories in the lab and find out if they're right or wrong. Evolution needs to wait for more evidence to be found, could be found tomorrow, might not be found for a decade, might never be found.
I'm not attempting to poke holes. I believe in evolution as a concept. But one must understand that as a non-experimental science its data gathering options are limited which causes it to mature the knowledge base slowly. Compare how much we know about evolution after 150 years to how much we knew about electricity after 150 years, and now think about how much more we've learned about electricity since then (a number of the things in your list are direct spawns from electrical science, shows how far that's come in just the last few decades). Then you'll see why I call evolutionary science young, I don't say it as a perjorative or reason to disbelieve, but merely as a point to understand that there's probably another few major revolutions in evolutionary thinking on the horizon and in another hundred years or so evolutionary scientists will probably look back on today's version of their science with a chuckle. I think evolutionary science is still in its phlogiston phase, and much how fire exists inspite of the phlogiston theory I believe evolution exists inspite of the probability that most current theories of the mechanics of it are probably wrong.
Good stuff. I'm prety much a surface dweller on evolutionary theory so I take corrections to my admitted over simplifications willingly.
I don't fit any of those descriptions, but I believe what the Bible says.
Only if the religious doctrine contradicts the evidence of science. The Catholics have wisely stated that they see no conflict with science's views on evolution and the beginnings of the earth. Thus Catholic children can go to any public school and understant that the science they learn was given them by God.
While fundimentalist children go to school and are forced by their doctrine to make a choice whether to believe all that evidence and reject their faith, or close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, and say LaLaLaLaLaLaLa.
Variation occurs and individuals have differences in reproductive success. That's evolution. The mechanics of variation are still being studied, if that's what you mean, but they aren't central to the concept.
A fraud? A monkey? You must have this confused with something else.
This specimen was found in South Africa in 1947, by Broom and Robinson.
The likely position of this species (Australopithecus africanus) is shown in the following chart (on the left side, about the third one up):
Source: http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeDating/HumanEvol_info.html
That's kind of what I mean, mostly I'm thinking about the macro end, how we get whole new species is still a pretty rough section of the science and looking back at how other sciences have progressed I'm guess current theories are probably wrong. Not because I see any holes, I don't know enough to tell one way or the other, but just because that's the normal trend, each branch of science usually gets it wrong a couple of times before the get it right.
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