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Comment by rudle | Hacker News Reader

Headline should read "63% of Americans reject Darwin's Theory of Evolution"

The headline might just as well read "This article is designed to make Americans look foolish no matter what"

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)

I think your interpretation is wrong. Darwin's theory is that of evolution through natural selection.

Evolution through guidance of a supremem being is different and antithetical to Darwin's ideas.

You, like the people in this study, are simply not seeing things through a religious person's eyes. Let me give you one example.

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.

I agree. A religious person could go so far as to say that God put in place the process of evolution and let things run knowing that man would end up emerging.

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.

When God intervened is not a meaningful question: God is outside time. It is rather like asking when an author intervened in the events of a book, in terms of the books time-line.

As a God is the creator of everything, the big bang and time and space are all part of God's creation.

See I can believe that 'God' could have arranged everything in the universe to play out in the right order and set the big bang to make everything happen. Determinism is actually expressly stated as being true by Jesus in the bible, so I always found it laughable that there was the whole 'intervention' thing like Intelligent Design. I mean god's supposed to be omniscient, he knows all so why would he have to intervene because he had the ability to know exactly what would happen and could arrange it all before creating the universe.

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.

Actually one of the most interesting things in plant evolution is that they evolved into fruit producers to protect themselves from large herbivores. Primates likely served as an ample defense against skittish herbivores. There's trees that host nests of ants that will drive away a giraffe, and what do the ants get in return? Fruit of course.

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.

Selecting the option on a survey that species "evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being" allows ample room for believing in whatever is the current widely-held scientific opinion. This is a smear job.

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.

its more like Darwin's theory is that of evolution through natural selection and small changes or mutations in traits

and that is where many people believe guidance from above comes in

Ah, so God's in the cosmic rays and the replication errors?

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.

God's in the cosmic rays, the replication errors, and everything else. Monotheism means there's nobody else to blame.

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.

You could say that, but that would be to define God as random chance - and if you want to define God in that way, I suppose I could say I believe in God. Probably not a very useful definition, however.

And we're off to the races!

Comment threads like this are why we can't have nice things.

The DNA evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

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 wording needs to be quite specific here. For instance, I am essentially a deist, but I choose to believe that the universe was "created," if you will, by a deity who knew exactly how the starting conditions would play out. (Yes, I'm implying that the current state of the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang deterministically; we'll assume that the Divine Architect is not troubled by little things like quantum uncertainty, even though we are.)

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.

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