Are You Too Dumb to Understand Evolution?

CreationEvolutionHeadlines ^ | September 10, 2008

[GodGunsGuts]

Sept 10, 2008 — Astrobiologist David Deamer believes that life can spontaneously emerge without design, but he thinks lay people are too uneducated to understand how this is possible, so he gives them the watered-down version of Darwin’s natural selection instead, which he knows is inadequate to explain the complexity of life. That’s what he seemed to be telling reporter Susan Mazur in an interview for the Scoop (New Zealand). Is the lay public really too dense for the deeper knowledge of how evolution works?...

[MartyK]

Better keep digging through the old archives. You’ve come up empty so far.

Your examples are NOT dependent on being brain-washed by evolutionism.

“Animal testing”: NOT.
Mice and men can die from drug overdoses, therefore they have a common ancestor? Or vice versa?
Further afield, the idea of taking canaries into coal mines could spring ONLY from the mind of a Darwinist miner?
Still further and sillier – frogs and watermelons are green on the outside, contain water and will be squished if you drive your car over them. Reason being, they both come from amphibia watermelonis (fossil to follow any day now).

“Genetic testing of families”: NOT.
The father of the field of genetics was Gregor Mendel, a Catholic monk (how dare those religious types infringe on science!). His ground-breaking work with pea plants (none of which turned into prunes) owed nothing to Charles Darwin.

“Drug-resistant bacteria”: NOT.
As Sister Mary Elephant might have said: “Class. Class. CLASS! SHUUUUT UUPP!!! Thank you. Now, for the twentieth time, class, what do antibiotic-resistant bacteria and non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria have in common? Anyone ? Anyone? Correct! THEY’RE BOTH BACTERIA!”
And are you really trying to make me believe that we never would have had a clue why the penicillin was no longer effective UNLESS we believed in bacteria-to-Barry Bonds evolution?

And so, I repeat the question:
Can you, or anyone out there, name one, single, solitary scientific discovery or technological development, that has had a real impact (good or bad) on our every day lives, for which belief in Darwinian or neo-Darwinian theory was indispensable?

[js1138]

I’m so happy I apparently misunderstood the definition of evolution. So, it really has nothing to do with how cows and birds and humans came to be.

You still misunderstand the definition of evolution. If you look at the actual fossil record, which includes millions of classified specimens, you will see most lineages connected by transitions much finer than the differences between dog breeds.

[Fichori]

“You have to realize that once anyone gives any indication that they do not take the hardline evoatheist no God/ no intelligence allowed position, that they are automatically crammed by the FRevos into the YEC Bible literalist, geocentric, flat earther box that is used to portray anyone who doesn’t tow the evo party line as backwards ignorant knuckle draggers.” [excerpt]

I really don't mind being called a Knuckle Dragger.

If I'm a Knuckle Dragger and I ask an Evo a question and they cannot answer, what does that make them?

Dumber than a Knuckle Dragger?

[tpanther]

This viewpoint justifies abortion, euthenasia, and genocide. Those who are of little to no value to the greater, transcendent society may be purged with no moral consequences. Here's some more results of such ideology: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2083330/posts

[tpanther]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2083330/posts

[GourmetDan]

"Random, as a definition, includes probabilistic. Your objection is as ridiculous as saying someone who says “7 card stud is a random game” had no interest in approaching the subject honestly."

You are deliberately using the word 'random' in order to mislead people. Were you interested in accuracy, you would say that mutation is probabilistic, not 'random'.

"Some mutations are made more often than others just as some errors in speaking are more common than others."

Which is why you should not use the term 'random'.

[metmom]

Maybe I’m having an early onset of Alzheimer’s, but I can’t seem to remember one, single, solitary scientific discovery or technological development, that has had a real impact (good or bad) on our every day lives, for which belief in Darwinian or neo-Darwinian theory was indispensable.

Sounds like early Alzheimer's to me.

There's tons of technological development outside the field of biology where the ToE never even enters.

Please explain how one's opinion or belief in how humans got here is critical to manned space flight, prediction of the weather, earthquake prediction, development of imaging machines for medical diagnosis, energy production through nuclear means.

[metmom]

Crap. Shouldn’t post whilst being distracted. I read that as *wasn’t* indispensable.

Never mind previous post.....

[metmom]

Heh.

The evidence supports that, you know....

[allmendream]

I AM deliberately using the word “random” and I will continue to do so.

A Card game is RANDOM. You can cry at me until you are blue in the face that it is “probabilistic” and I will laugh and tell you AGAIN that the definition of random INCLUDES probabilistic.

RANDOM: Mathematics & Statistics. Of or relating to a type of circumstance or event that is described by a probability distribution.

And your intent in using a Gibson quote? You showed two things with that little tactic. One, you are dishonest enough to take a paper about evolutionary analysis and chop a quote of it out of context. Two; that you are not intelligent enough to discern that they never even tested mutation, they assumed it based upon the concept of common descent.

If you had any sense of shame you would be embarrassed by repeatedly showing your abject ignorance of the subject. But I guess being a Geocentricist means never admitting you are losing an argument.

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

"Can you, or anyone out there, name one, single, solitary scientific discovery or technological development, that has had a real impact (good or bad) on our every day lives, for which belief in Darwinian or neo-Darwinian theory was indispensable...

...and that can't be distorted and misrepresented in such a way as to let me claim that it has nothing to do with evolutionary theory?"

Based on your performance with the last suggestions, I doubt anyone can.

[MartyK]

“look at the actual fossil record, which includes millions of classified specimens, you will see most lineages connected by transitions much finer than the differences between dog breeds.”

Are you saying we have millions of transitional fossils, which indicate the many fine/subtle changes allegedly connecting A(naconda) to Z(ebra)?

[js1138]

Millions total. What I said was we have many lineages with gradations finer than that between breeds of dogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
http://darwiniana.org/transitionals.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/transitional.html
http://hometown.aol.com/darwinpage/dinobirds.htm
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/03/transitional-fo.html

But what is more interesting is that over the last 150 years, evolution has predicted the finding of such fossils, and has predicted where to look for them. No other interpretation of fossils requires or predicts the finding of transitional forms or explains why they are found in certain strata and not others.

[mrjesse]

You seem hung up on this 2.1 degrees that you calculated, it isn't a constant.

Well, according to your claim the 2.1 degrees is due to the fact that the earth rotates 2.1 degrees in the 8.3 minutes it takes light to travel the 1AU from sun to earth. And so if the 2.1 degrees isn't cosntant, then either the earth has to move in or out, or the speed of light needs to change, or the rotational rate of the earth needs to change -- none of which are happening at a fast enough rate to change the 2.1 degrees significantly in either of our lifetimes! What do you mean it's not constant?

I don't think that you are capable of learning anything new that contradicts your mental map.

Well, I might believe you on that, except you've said so many things that just don't make sense and you've said some outright fallacies. For example, you claimed that the 20 arcseconds was not due to stellar aberration. But look around: WP and MP and C.S, PoA and Wolfram - and there are many more reference clearly explaining that Stellar Aberration is the name describing the 20 arcseconds of apparent angular displacement of the sun and other objects due to the earth's transverse velocity of 67K miles an hour as it orbits the sun. Stellar Aberration is unrelated to the distance of the object.

My point is that you were wrong on a simple thing like that and who knows what else you're wrong on. So I'm not so sure it's me who's incapable of learning things.

My point was that you did the calculations before you found out that the Sun was moving at over 500,000 mph. Do you also know that the galaxy that the Earth is orbiting is itself orbiting the center of the Universe at a great speed?

Now here's where it gets rich. You almost pulled the wool over my eyes. If you will recall, when you brought up the half a million miles an hour issue, I said "And I'm not certain it's a valid argument anyway - some writers seem to say that it only applies to relative velocity (which doesn't make sense to me)" -- but now it does make sense to me why all the resources I found on the net seemed to indicate that the velocity of our universe did not cause an apparent angular displacement of the sun's position.

It doesn't! Because the sun and the earth are moving through space together at half a million miles an hour -- in other words, their speed relative to eachother is only 67KMPH -- not half a million MPH -- we don't even have to worry about the higher speed.

Well how can this be? First of all, as you know, Stellar Aberration, which is caused by the observer's transverse velocity, causes the apparent position of the object being observed to be ahead (in relation to the observer's direction) of where the object actually us. Remember, driving in the falling snow - the snowflakes appear to come from in front of you.

On the other hand, Light-time correction is the result of the distance to and angular velocity of the object. But when two objects are moving in the same direction at the same speed, there is no angular velocity of the object being observed, therefore there is no Light-Time Correction.

Or let me put it another way: The apparent lag of light time correction is exactly canceled out by the apparent advance caused by Stellar Aberration when the observer is moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the object!

So I don't know whether you knew that and thought you'd pull the wool over my eyes or whether you just didn't know that. (If you doubt it to be true - let me know and I'll do an animation to demonstrate it.)

Come to think of it, I don't recall you ever admitting that you had been wrong or that you didn't know something. And I know you've been wrong about some stuff - so I rather suspect that if you knew you were wrong you wouldn't admit it to me. Which explains a lot of stuff - like why you won't answer my questions about Pluto and why you can't provide any reference from real scientists who agree with you (even though you claim that everyone at Nasa agrees with you.

And this also explains why you won't give your 2.1 degrees a name -- is it Stellar Aberration? Light-time Correction? Secular Aberration? LeGrandean Aberration? -- because if you claimed any of those (Except the last) I'd be able to point out how your claim was wrong.

So what is the deal? Did you think I wouldn't ever figure it out? (You almost pulled that one over on me!) Or did you just not know any better yourself?

In any case, the half a million miles an hour causes what is called Secular Aberration, it amounts to about 0.04 degrees but it only applies to things not moving at half a million miles an hour with us - and it doesn't apply to the Sun.

Thus, I maintain that the biggest source of apparent angular displacement of the sun for an observer on the earth is Stellar Aberration, and is about 20 arcseconds, and is due to the earth's transverse velocity of 67K mph as it orbits the sun.

Furthermore, you've said so many wrong things and as far as I can remember not once admitted that you were wrong, and you refuse to provide any scientific research that backs up your claim, the only logical conclusion that I can come to is that you made the whole thing up and don't have the integrity to admit it when you've been wrong.

But why would you do this? Because last time you said "I give. You win." my response was "At which point did you realize that your statement was foundationally incorrect?" -- of course which you would not answer, so then you came back that I was clueless and all the sudden you didn't "give" anymore. So what does this mean? Does it mean that there's one thing worse for you then to give up and that is to admit that you knew you were wrong but wouldn't admit it?

It's all clear to me now. The more we talk, the more absurd things you say. You must be making it up and for some odd reason think everyone will believe it.

Thanks,

-Jesse

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

My main point is that we should make the parent the boss in education as much as possible. Parental involvement is key. As parental involvement is increased, innovations in education will be unleashed. The evolution debate is a way of arguing against parental involvement.

Speaking of innovative thinking, it's fungible. Not trying to belittle your point, but just to put it in perspective: if I were feeling snarky, I'd say that Gilligan's Island had a tremendous impact on today's understanding of science. But that would sound vicious and hostile. Please forgive my glibness this morning.

To get serious for a moment — fuzzy memory alert— but there was a philosopher I think who, prior to Darwin, believed in a kind of ‘choice based’ evolution. Now we find elements of truth in that misconception which helps flesh out Darwin's theory. Since evolution is now established as NOT being random selection, there are forces at work which we've yet to fully comprehend.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

“But what is more interesting is that over the last 150 years, evolution has predicted the finding of such fossils, and has predicted where to look for them. No other interpretation of fossils requires or predicts the finding of transitional forms or explains why they are found in certain strata and not others.”

I’ll grant that’s a strong point. I’m also intrigued by the intuitiveness of mutations. So let’s assume [for a moment] you won the debate. Should all parents be required to submit their kids to evolution if the parents are religiously opposed to it? Or are you confident that truth wins out through free speech in the long run?

[js1138]

I think that if Biology (or any other science) is taught, it should be taught honestly. I don’t think students should be required to take Biology.

Chemistry or Physics would do for high school.

There is honest debat over whether teachere should respond to students’ questions about objections to evolution. I personally think that most such discussions would go pretty much the same way these threads do. They would be interpreted as attacks on religion.

[Elsie]

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Looks good to me.

"I'm a BELIEVER now!"

[Elsie]

Yep, now I'm sure you don't know what you're talking about.

Keepin' 'em in skool helps the unemployment rate.

Among both students and faculty.

[Elsie]

Elisha's bones didn't raise a dead man from the grave. Christ didn't rise from the dead and return 2000 years ago. Constantine the Emperor/Pope who put the Bible together was a cynical pagan. The Bible is a book of history mixed with myths, parables and stolen stories.

Are you SURE?

When you are awakened in the night by doubt, get up and re-read the books that gave you this information - it'll put you back to sleep.