And now to the Republican debate on MSNBC – except, I just have to say, did you see that three Republicans raised their hands to signify that they did not believe in evolution?
From what I could see, it wasn’t Giuliani or McCain and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Romney at the other end. But three others Republican candidates did raise their hands. (They have been identified as Sen. Sam Brownback, Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Rep. Tom Tancredo.) The mind boggles – I thought for a second I was watching The Tudors, except then it would have been more entertaining…
I admit it. I didn’t watch either of the so-called debates. If there was any promise of issues considered beyond sound bites – or political conviction overruling speech writers – I might have given it a try.
As I’ve linked above, there can be the rare surprising moment of clarity – scarey though it may be in illustrating just how backwards these demagogues have become. Of course, even scarier is the number of Americans equally out of touch with science and reality.
Evolution aside, the cartoon at the top of the post somewhat mis-states scientific method. Scientific method starts with a hypothesis – a sort of preliminary conclusion – and uses data to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
#31 – lynn
“…the cartoon at the top of the post somewhat mis-states scientific method.”
Might I humbly suggest that that may be due to the fact that it is, in point of fact, a cartoon, and not a 14-page article in The Atlantic.
Being a cartoon, it serves, as great cartoons do, to draw a bright line between two competing paradigms.
That is, the cartoon says:
(a) Assemble objective facts from most-expert sources >> draw provisional conclusions
(b)
DecideBe told what is subjective “fact”, by least-expert sources >> seek superficially-plausible rationalizations to reinforce a priori declaration of “facts”, without regard to correspondence to reality…in a very few, well-chosen words, readily comprehended by the lay reader, whom it would most benefit.
For an complete and comprehensive explanation of the scientific method, it would be appropriate to look elsewhere.
IOW, it’s aimed at the general public, which is ill-equipped to comprehend the nonvalidity of argument-from-authority, not knowing what in science constitutes authority – or consensus. Examples of such powerful stupidity abound, such as Graham, at #29, supra.
“Show me a scientist with his “theory” and I’ll show you another scientist with his “theory” on the same facts.”
No, Graham. Every discipline has it’s cranks, goofballs and loonies, being composed of human beings.
Trotting out a lone loony who has no evidence for his claims (as anti-evos always do) proves nothing. Every sane and competent expert in the field knows quite well what the current conclusions are. They often differ on highly esoteric details of “how” but no professional researcher in the life sciences questions the fundamental fact of evolution. Keep repeating that comforting falsehood all you want; it won’t make it so.
As soon as someone – anyone, anywhere – comes up with any little bit of credible evidence to the contrary, everyone will know about it. That’s not how religion works, but it is how science does. And that’s why we can travel to the Moon and no longer live in caves – despite the best efforts of primitive superstition to the contrary.
And guess what…
Al Gore Doesn’t Believe In Evolution, either.
I had read blog comments before which indicated that Al Gore is a religious man, which intrigued me, because from his movie, he comes across as a man who is ready to accept science as the proper methodology (versus evangelical faith in biblical literalism). He did not mention any kind of religious beliefs in the movie …
During his live slideshow today, however, he showed his true colors. One of his slides was a quote from Genesis, which he used to show that humans are the stewards of biodiversity.
The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans.”
In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind – apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.
He tarnishes his beautifully crafted presentation by not only stating his belief in creationism – but by placing the words “Adam and Eve” right on the slide (which is actually a scientific graph) as a caption explaining the beginnings of mankind.
I guess it’s not too surprising. “Scientific Creationism” and “Global Warming” have a lot in common.
Lemme see if I got you right, seeing as how I’m a bit dense…
A person (any person) says “A is a scientific fact.”
He or she then says “My personal belief – on a different subject – is B”
Since B is absurdly false, therefore A is absurdly false, since the claims came from the same person.
Therefore anything anyone says that is false completely invalidates everything else that he or she says.
Thanks for the lesson in Logic-Free Reasoning®™… 🙂
#29
You are proving your ignorance. Scientists do not make conclusions based on a single piece of evidence. Go to TalkOrigins.org and you will find information that explains how scientists really determine the age of rock strata and fossils.
Evolution can easily be reproduced in laboritories by creating two environments for the same bacteria. Evolution is an observable fact. The evidence that species *have* evolved is overwhelming. The “theory of evolution” is meant as an explaination for how, how fast, under what conditions and why that happened.
> I believe the Bible wholly. Prove it
> wrong and I’ll believe you.
Does that mean you accept the Earth is flat? You accept that light was created before light producing objects? You accept that snakes can talk? You accept that in ancient times people really could live to age 930? Please, the Bible is a chronicle of an ancient and superstitious people. It was never meant to be taken literally.
Oh, thanks for reminding me, Thomas…
“I believe the Bible wholly. Prove it wrong and I’ll believe you.”
Uh, sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Science is not obliged to disprove every silly belief people pop up with.
The way it works is this:
You are the one making the claim.
You are the one obliged to demonstrate the truth of your claim.
In other words, put up or shut up.
As soon as you or anyone else produces a single molecule of evidence supporting your claim, the whole world will stop and take a look at what you’ve got.
Considering the undeniable fact that not one shard of a fragment of a particle of proof of your beliefs has ever been produced, do you actually think for one instant that that’s just a coïncidence?
#36 – Lauren the Ghoti,
Keep going. You’re definitely on the right track. Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like you’re making much headway. So, I’ll offer a just a bit of the preponderance of real hard evidence for evolution.
1) Speciation, i.e. formation of a new species by evolution, was actually witnessed in the Galapagos recently. Here’s a link to a peer reviewed article about it.
http://tinyurl.com/2jm98w
2) Evolution has made a number of predictions that have been confirmed in the field. The theory has stated that as the fossil record fills in, we will find intermediate stages of evolution. Creationists of yore had used, among others, the lack of intermediate cetaceans and intermediate feathers as examples championing their case against evolution. Ambuloocetus and Basilosaurus are the genuses for the intermediate whales later discovered, the former with vestigial legs. Amazingly, intermediate feathers of many species of dinosaurs were recently found fossilized in China, showing all stages of complexity of the feathers.
3) Many features are particularly just slightly imperfect, showing their evolutionary history, rather than perfection and intelligence in design. For example, the panda needed a thumb to strip bamboo. Rather than detaching the fused thumb from the rest of the fingers, the panda has an enlarged wrist bone (a radial sesamoid, I believe), that serves the purpose well enough. Our own eyes have all of the rods and cones facing away from the light and reading a reflection. That would be fine, except for the bundle of nerves leading from inside the eye to outside the eye, causing a significant blind spot in each eye. Note that squid do not have this issue. Perhaps god likes squid better than humans.
Let me know if any of these carry any weight for the unconvinced among you. However, I caution that if you can read an article on the natural evolution of a new species and not be swayed, you’ll have to admit that your opinion is merely religious rather than scientific. I mean how much more could you want than a documented case of new species formation right before the eyes of a number of scientists studying the finches of the Galapagos?
Here’s a popular news publication of the same story I linked to above for those unwilling to pay for the peer-reviewed article. For the creationists in the crowd, this will appear to be from an (ahem) unbiased (choke .. gag) source, Fox (um) News (sort of).
http://tinyurl.com/ynprgx
There is no doubt, and no one in my church would say otherwise, that Evolution exists. However, science cannot prove that it relates to Man. There is NO evidence that Man Evolved from anything other than Man. That’s the Missing Link! So, prove me wrong.
So how do you explain Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, etc. Jim Hines?
Regarding Stephen J. Gould and the proof of evolution. Seems like he promoted punctuated equilibrium, when the rest of the evolution camp was promoting gradual evolution.
And this is proven???
Get real, the pseudo science camp places faith in evolution because that’s their preference. Your proof is nothing more than inference from observable evidence. In my book inference isn’t proof.
You can choose to believe in evolution if you like, but stop and think please. You are no better than the catholics during the time of galileo. Shut down anyone who disagrees.
Ugggghhhhh. And you claim to be open minded.
Misanthropic Scott,
birds with a bigger beak, wow. So impressive. for a minute i thought you were citing something interesting, but nope, Emporer still has no clothes…
#42 – Brock,
Punctuated equilibrium is only about the speed of speciation. There is no dispute about the existence of evolution.
#40 – Jim Himes,
Sorry. If you feel the need to believe that you were specially created by god, why should I take that away from you?
#43 – Joshua Caleb,
That is what evolution is all about. Incremental change. If you want to see a crocodile turn into a duck, you’ve got a huge misunderstanding about evolution.
#40
How do you explain the fact that the DNA of chimps and humans are 98% identical? How do you explain the fact that we have evidence of different species of humans such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis? Homo sapiens are just one of a long line of evolutionary changes that resulted in many other species of human being failing to survive. The evidence that man, just like all other animals, evolved is also overwhelming. Go to TalkOrigins.org for more.
#42
Your remarks show an ignorance of what is meant in the scientific community by “evolution.” Are we talking about the observable fact that species evolve or are we talking about the theories that explain how and how fast evolution occurs?