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Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

My favorite mistake The Economist made was a survey they ran. They compared UK to US, and supposedly one of the questions was:

What better explains the origins of the Earth?

A) Evolution.

B) The Bible.

It's unclear whether they literally asked that question, or they asked about origins of life and just had a copyediting mistake in the summary of the results. They ignored my letter about it, though, so I suspect the former :)

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That's funny, because technically the answer is B.

If does provide a cleaner answer, but only in the same way that the flu can be more easily described as a witches curse.

Their point is that evolution doesn't explain the origin of Earth, a planet, at all. While the Bible's explanation may be fiction, it does offer an explanation for the origin of Earth, and is therefor the better explanation by virtue of providing an explanation.

Yeah, with the way it's phrased, it's a trick question.

Ah, absolutely true. Evolution doesn't explain the origin of the cosmos. My lazy brain fell right into the trap.

No, no, it does, you see. Everything evolves! Everything from the lowliest quark to the grandest Londoner desires to become greater than it is, to achieve the pinnacle of being, to immanentize the eschaton, by becoming a phony-doctor of computer science from Texas.

Yeah, evolution didn't get started until after the Earth had already originated. Not saying that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is the best explanation, but it's certainly better than what evolution gives, which is "after the earth already existed..."

This thread is assuming biological evolution, but dynamic systems in general evolve. Maybe I'm stretching the word too much, but the question was a trick question to begin with.

I mean... The dictionary definition of "evolve" is basically "things happened over time". But especially increasing in complexity, although it's not a necessary qualification.

So basically, as long as there is any temporal component, it "evolved". But I'd argue that saying it happened doesn't explain how it happened. So the "correct" answer is still B.

Is your statement 'Saying that it evolved is not saying how it evolved.'?

We have planetary and solar system dynamics fairly well understood in terms of models and matching that with observational data. So I think an astrophysicist could make the how argument from an evolutionary perspective.

Your initial point was that we should not assume "Evolution" means biological evolution. Let's remember that and proceed:

In a pedantic sense, saying that "it evolved" means nothing because everything "evolved" for some suitable non-Darwinian interpretation of what "evolved" means. For example, if you're willing to not assume "Evolution" implies "biological evolution" then why not argue that woman evolved from man's rib as per the Bible and that man "evolved" from dirt?

"Evolution" without explicit context, and perhaps additional qualification (e.g. "the evolution of our solar system") means that as much as it means nothing.

I think “I don't know, that's not my department” is a better explanation than an elaborate one which purports to address the question but which is both inconsistent with itself and, whichever way you resolve the internal inconsistency, also with the external evidence, so even reading “evolution” as “the theory of evolution by natural selection”, I think it's the better explanation.

But “better” always involves a subjective quality judgement.

It is also a weird question since the Bible is hardly the only version of a "god" or higher entity.

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