63% - Reject Darwin's Theory of Evolution
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
I don't think it's quite as bad as it sounds. I bet half the people polled were hearing the question, "Are you a good Christian?" and that is what they answered.
What they did was to omit one important fact in order to get their desired results. From the article...
63% of Americans say they believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being
You can still be religious and believe in Darwin's theories. This article attaches atheism to Darwinism and uses that unnecessary attachment to make its flawed point
(For those who needed it spelled out what I'm saying is there's no reason why people can't believe in evolution and think it was designed by a supreme being. But when you put "have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being" as an alternative to "Believe in Evolution" you force a person who believes in a supreme being to vote against evolution no matter what)
Evolution through guidance of a supremem being is different and antithetical to Darwin's ideas.
It is well within the realm of possibility that a religious person could believe the impact event that made the Dinosaurs extinct was some kind of divine intervention. If God's purpose is to create man and man could not stay alive long enough to evolve with Dinosaurs roaming around than it's not a big stretch for God to do away with the Dinosaurs.
If they believed that, and also believed humans evolved according to Darwin's theories, wouldn't that be "guidance by a higher power?"
That's just the most obvious religious argument that could be made. There are tons of others. The fact that the people doing this study didn't think far enough ahead to come up with something I thought of in the minute after reading your post proves, to me, that it's flawed.
The problem with that argument is deciding when God intervened. Evidence appears to point to the Big Bang theory being correct and we push further and further back in time closer and closer to the Big Bang itself we leave less and less room for God's intervention.
As a God is the creator of everything, the big bang and time and space are all part of God's creation.
You make a good comparison to an author, the story is already written by the time you or I read it. I mean you don't get Stephen King walking into your house and going "Hold up! I need to change something on page 241, I made a mistake." I don't see why God should need to do so.
Even if Dinosaurs hadn't been killed in a mass extinction, trees had already begun evolving their countermeasure and it's the fruit production which is directly attributed to the spread of primates. So we would have likely evolved in some form even if dinosaurs were still around.
I mean there's some extremely weird things in the world that give an insight into what would have happened in a world with dinosaurs. The most common thing we think of is snakes, crocodiles and alligators eating large pray animals and being rather successful. However the smallest mammals seem able to defend their territory from reptiles. I've heard of adult rabbits killing snakes, which is rather contrary to what you'd think. I've seen a Hare eating a grass snake before. Meerkats will chase off puff adders (that can kill humans), baboons will torments and kill crocodiles.
The thing that really illustrates what primates would have done against the predominantly land based dinosaurs is that a gibbons will defend their territory from tigers. I saw it on National Geographic IIRC, and it's quite amusing to watch because the gibbon will grab at the ears, pull on the tail and just outright kick and slap the tiger while swinging from the trees. If it's nothing for a gibbon to fight off a tiger, then imagine what it would be like for any dinosaurs that are ambush predators.
They don't like religious people. We get it. They should just admit their biases and write an op-ed instead of trying to mislead people with this truly dreadful article.
and that is where many people believe guidance from above comes in
I'm sorry but the original poster is clearly saying that the article is attempting to be misleading, by creating a false dichotomy between natural selection and 'designed' evolution.
I see no evidence that the dichotomy is false.
If I read in the news about Joe Shmoe winning the lottery, I might say that God "guided" the lottery balls in a way that caused Joe's number to come up. But I wouldn't deny the scientific truth of Newton's laws of motion, or deny that from a human observer's point of view, the selection of lottery numbers is random.
Comment threads like this are why we can't have nice things.
But evolution doesn't explain "inner experience" and probably never will.
So the mystery will remain, and many people will attribute or define this mystery to/as God.
The point is that if you said "iron_ball, do you believe humans evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being," I might say yes. If you then said, "iron_ball, do you believe any stage of human evolution requires supernatural intervention," I would roll my eyes, slap my forehead, slap your forehead, and leave.
The majority of what most people believe is wrong in one or more very significant ways. This has been the case since the first people started beliving.
About the only thing that will continue to exist in abundance is stupidity sustained by abysmal ignorance and the taking of stuff that belongs to others.
This "controversy" has been in the news for how many years now?
When the Kansas board of education originally decided to teach creationism that was news.
I think at this point in time pretty much everyone knows about this.
Maybe not everyone knows the exact percentage but how is that numbers news? It might be if it was whoppingly higher or lower then expected, but it's not.
And while you and I might not debate this here, others won't be able to help themselves.
They'll have to debate it, because gosh darn it lots of people are wrong on the internet!
And debates like that tend to get linked to at places, forums, etc, that love to debate these things.
Then more people come here to debate Darwinism.
AFAIK (and IANRD) Darwin's theory has been extensively updated (especially by discovering the work of Mendel on the mechanism), but it has not been rejected.
IANRD = I Am Not Richard Dawkins
Darwin basically said that species compete for scarce resources, and the organisms that are the best at competing win. This is entirely wrong.
In reality, the organisms that are the best adapted for their niche win-- almost always because they are the best at cooperating, not competing. (With a few salient exceptions such as the deer locking horns on the discovery channel, which make for good TV.) This was Wallace's theory, which was rejected because Wallace was a social reformer who took shots at the aristocracy. Whereas Darwin was a well connected socialite, and his model was favored by the aristocracy because it provided a justification for oppressing the masses. When you embrace Darwin, you're not embracing science, you're embracing fascism.
Some quotes on this from Alfie Kohn's book No Contest:
Pter Kropotkin: "Competition [...] is limited among animals to exception periods. [...] Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. [...] "Don't Compete" -- competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!" That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. "Therefore combine -- practice mutual aid!" That is what nature teaches us." -- Mutual Aid, 1902
Marvin Bates: "This competition, this 'struggle,' is a superficial thing, superimposed on an essential mutual dependence. The basic theme in nature is cooperation rather than competition -- a cooperation that has become so all-pervasive, so completely integrated, that it is difficult to untwine and follow out the separate strands."
"Not only do animals seek to avoid competition, but their behavior is overwhelmingly characterized by its opposite -- cooperation."
"If biologists have been saying this ever since Darwin, why does this seem so surprising to us? First, cooperation is "not always easy to see, whereas competition can be readily observed." Quite frankly, the bird sitting in the hippopotomus's back just doesn't make good television compared to two deer locking antlers or the bear catching the salmon as it tries to jump up the waterfall."
"Second, the metaphor of "survival of the fittest" suggests a type of combat, since warfare and struggle is such a salient feature of the human species."
John Taylor Gatto's new book, Weapons of Mass Instruction, talks extensively about this as well. Even this week's NYT give Wallace a nod:
Secondly you say that "In reality, the organisms that are the best adapted for their niche win-- almost always because they are the best at cooperating".
Now, I'm eager to see you give decent examples. How is cooperation in any way involved in the production of poison-resistant rats, the speckled moth transitions, the evolution of the horse's hoof, the eye?
Is the first quote above REALLY suggesting that there is no competition for fit mates among mating animals? That birds won't strip a fruiting tree before their compatriots get a chance?
Bollocks. I embrace Einstein, does that make me a Jew?
You quote from "No Contest", an interesting book, but not a book about evolution. You'll also recall from that book that the author quotes Stephen Jay Gould saying that natural selection doesn't imply cooperation or competition a priori. So I think your supporting quotes don't add much to the argument.
And, so what if animals have evolved to cooperate with each other? If that's the way natural selection has taken things then so be it. Doesn't take away from natural selection as the mechanism.
So, the core of your argument is "Darwin basically said that species compete for scarce resources, and the organisms that are the best at competing win. This is entirely wrong."
Perhaps quoting Darwin is the solution: "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form"
"Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection"
My reading of that is that Darwin is saying that individuals compete to survive and they compete with other 'organic beings' and nature in general. And specifically he is saying any variation that is profitable to the individual. Doesn't exclude cooperation with others. He says that any variation that is beneficial will make that individual survive and that it will be passed on.
I read Darwin's struggle as a metaphor. For example, if I am born with a stronger immune system than those around me I may be more likely to survive an epidemic and thus I am more successful in the 'struggle' for life. In no way did I actively compete against my fellow humans.
Similarly, if I am born with better vision than my fellow humans I may survive longer because I am a better hunter (or see the bear that wants to eat me before others do). Did I struggle against my fellow human? No.
"In no way did I actively compete against my fellow humans."
Competition just means that in order for one person to win, another person has to lose. In the case of your immune system example, I would agree that you winning doesn't cause anyone else to lose. But in Darwin's words, "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence." This to me does imply that for one person to win, someone else has to lose, even if there isn't any direct fight. When in reality, for most organisms, there are virtually unlimited resources and the best way to survive is to help everyone else survive as well. There are times when resources are scarce and competition becomes essential, but those times are the exception, and not the rule as Darwin's quote seems to imply.
Darwin's work actually describes, contrary to what people assume, is that the fittest species survives. Fittest doesn't mean strongest or healthiest, it in fact means its ability to adapt to the environment around it. Homo Sapiens as a species have adapted extremely well, we've moved from the Savanna and each new sub-species has spread further and further. In fact we went from living in a small region of Africa to spanning from the Arctic to Antarctic and from the most westerly point to the most easterly point on the map. In fact, humans are currently the only species to ever expand off the surface of the planet. Our survivability went from bipedal primates to astronauts, currently as a species we have the potential to survive possibly anything except a gamma-ray burst aimed in our direction.
Warm blooded creatures won out over cold blooded creatures, despite wasting something like 32 times the energy. Why did this happen? Well aside from the apex predators, warm blooded creatures have decimated cold blooded creatures because we always have a constant supply of energy. Right now I can get up and go for a run, but then look at Crocodiles, they only have a range of a few feet out of their territory before they're not safe anymore.
The Nile Crocodile is an awesome and fearful predator, but like all its cousins it only survives in one niche. They eat everything including all the big cats and baboons. However, even full adult Nile Crocodiles are easy prey once they're on land and even in water a troop of hungry baboons can get themselves some juicy crocodile by luring it onto land.
My point is, the Nile Crocodile wins nearly every time in its territory, but it'll never win outside its territory. So what happens when the environment changes? Well migratory animals appear to shift their behaviors accordingly. The only hope for the Crocodiles is that it doesn't get too hot or too cold too fast, because unless the Crocs can spread through expansion they'll go extinct.
When it comes down to individuals there's lots of things that contribute to whether or not you'll 'survive' and most are down to the individuals genetics. It doesn't matter if a person is strong or weak if they're physically incapable of procreation through infertility or any other means. Reproduction is downright genocide, the sperm are dumped into a hostile environment that's designed to kill them so only the strongest actually manage to get to the egg, then it takes several sperms to die before a single sperm can implant the egg (ironically the first to get there doesn't necessarily win) and then once the fetus is developing, the mothers immune system is on a war path to destroy it. If the child survives all that, then it has a good chance of reaching maturity and passing on its own genes.
Simply saying that competition means one wins and one loses is absurd because individuals don't matter, it's the species as a whole and thats what Darwin was talking about. He didn't see a fist fight and say, I know I'm going to write the greatest thesis ever! No he traveled around the world and saw how wide spread and diverse species were and then he wrote the greatest thesis ever after seeing multiple sub-species spread throughout huge swathes of the earth.
Cooperation between species is merely a subclass of competition in evolutionary terms. It usually occurs in two species of prey where they can share their abilities and as a pair they can compete and win against a predator.
You seem to be thinking of the Clownfish/Anemone symbiosis. It's true that both benefit from this, however they're both competing for independent goals. The Clownfish helps prevent the Anemone from dying by cleaning it of undigested food, which can grow bacteria and kill the Anemone and in this manner the Anemone wins in competition against the bacteria/death. On the other hand the Clownfish is protected from predators by hiding in the anemone, which in turn means it beats its competition from any number of predators. This symbiosis doesn't thrive because cooperation is good, it thrives because the pair compete efficiently as a pair. However, if the symbiosis breaks down they both die.
There was an article on HN recently about why we should talk about "the theory of evolution" as opposed to "Darwinism", I suppose that's what you were saying?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10essa.html
[edit: heh, you replied again while I was writing this, so yes - that's what you were saying]
Religion and belief in God are brain noise. Its people seeing patterns in random disconnected events where there are no patterns. This has a very likely natural selection basis.
If you see a predator that isn't there, its much less costly than not seeing a predator that is there. So also, if you see food that isn't there, its much less costly than not seeing food that is there. Hence, natural selection will be in favor of the individual/population who overreacts to noise in the environment. This overreaction results in religions and belief in gods.
What would be worrying would be a similar level of ignorance among the US legislative and executive branches of government. It is at this level that one would hope common sense and a quality education would prevail and ensure that new legislation and research funding reflected a proper grasp of science (and Maths and the Arts too of course).
I think you've stumbled across a contradiction, considering those two words are synonymous. =]
We elected leadership that took pride in being ill-informed, and over the course of eight years that resulted in a near collapse (some might leave out the "near") of our nation. In the last election, the nation chose the candidate who seemed better informed and more curious about the issues.
So, the mechanism is the people see the fruits of ill-informed leadership and as a result choose a more informed one. This can take time to play out.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1107/polling-evolution-creationi...