Yahoo fails again. Yahoo science news writer outs herself as a creationist. | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo fails again. Yahoo science news writer outs herself as a creationist.

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19 pointsrorrr232 comments

Not sure why we're getting so worked up over this right now. If you read the article(kind of depressing), you'll see how her belief stems from her lack of actual understanding of the science she talks about in this article. "Yahoo fails again" is kind of a harsh response to the opinion of one person.

Edit: I agree that someone who thinks the world being created in six days is just as plausible as theoretical astrophysics shouldn't be doing science columns, but a quick glance at her history shows that she's more of a tech writer.

Let's not get all up in arms about it, it's a person who says "evolution didn't sound like as good a story as the bible, plus everything looks like an evolutionary nail to the evolutionary psychologists' evolutionary hammer, so I'm sticking with the bible for now."

She's answering the question "what sounds better to you as a story of where life came from", not "where did life actually come from". Let's not get our panties in a bunch.

EDIT: I know it's about evolution and not the origin of life, it was just a convenient way for me to phrase it.

She does say "I am a creationist."

The reason everything looks like an evolutionary nail is because it's true. Every psychological behavior is there because it evolved and can be explained if we know how it evolved.

Oh come on, surely many things are social? There are societies who don't even play (what we believed to be) fundamental games like the ultimatum game the same way we do. Many of the evolutionary psychology theories are post hoc rationalizations.

I don't mean to say that the theories are correct, but that there should be a reason why something is the way it is. Including social. That is something that evolved too. How else could it exist? I also think not everyone must have evolved the same way. Separate for thousands of years, some people MUST be different, right?

Evolutionary psychology isn't the study of how societies evolve, it's the study of how actual genetic evolution has shaped psychological responses. The claim that women prefer pink because their brains evolved to specialize in trichromacy when gathering fruits should probably not be given too much credence.

I don't think they should be given credence, either. But I think everything looks like a nail because everything is a nail. That is, every behavior can be explained by evolution. We just might not have the right one for a specific behavior.

The Theory of Evolution does not say this. In fact, the Theory is predicated on the existence of randomness and adaptation. What you're suggesting is that every behavior has a reason for existence, which is almost the opposite of the Theory of Evolution.

Where else would a behavior come from if it weren't purely molecular? The reason for a behavior might be that it is from a random mutation that even survived by random chance.

Maybe you just evolved to think that.

I wish I weren't a logician!

Your wish has been granted.

I certainly believe that I have!

Then we can never convince each other of anything! But, since we know people convince each other of things routinely, the original premise P is a contradiction, therefore not P.

I'm glad we agree, let's go for drinks.

>I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics

Seriously?

I think it's unfair to say "Yahoo!" failed, based solely on an opinion piece by one author.

She says "I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God."

A fact remains fact whether you find it compelling or not.

Being unable to believe in a theory the author cannot see with her own eyes (evolution of life on our planet is generally regarded as a relatively long process), the author jumps to a conclusion that the story in a book is more likely, on the basis of compulsion.

Considering I cannot prove without doubt either creation or evolution, compulsion is the only thing that can lead me to either side of the fence. So really, the mistake is to be compelled to decide one to be true ahead of the other, if, one regards being compelled a mistake.

She was never a "science news writer." Her column was about the intersection of internet and pop culture. The link title is incorrect in it's editorializing.

Evolution and creationism can co-exist. In fact that's the position of the Catholic Church. Wikipedia has an explanation [0] and the positions of former Popes.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

Thanks for the link, I never realized that about Catholicism.

I guess my position has always been similar; I don't see any conflict between evolution and the Bible. Evolutionary theory has no special tenet that God does not exist. The Bible's creation story may or may not be literal but it has no special tenet that the world was created such that it doesn't have a complete history, e.g. cut down a tree in the garden of Eden and I'd expect it to have tree rings showing its age or dig up some fossils and find dinosaurs, Adam's ancestors, etc. Everyone seems like they'd feel more comfortable if these were mutually exclusive but I personally see no reason for them to be mutually exclusive. Feel free to correct me if I'm overlooking something major.

If you ignore facts, they surely can.

They believe evolution just like you. They also believe it everything had to start somewhere and for them that's God. What facts would they be ignoring?

Most of them. Evolution and Creationism present two diametrically opposed explanations for how the current state of life on the Earth came to be. To suggest that they can happily coexist is disingenuous.

Certainly it's possible for religion and evolution to be reconciled. If and where the specific religion has views on how the conditions for evolution came to be and who "designed" the physical laws etc. But Catholicism certainly doesn't qualify in this regard.

Catholicism just absorbed the Big Bang (and even Darwinism) as another part of their dogma. Stephen Hawking tells how John Paul II once admonished him about new alternative theories that might interpret the big bang as "not really the beginning", such as the cyclic model, or Hoyle's steady state model, or multiverses, etc. Not different at all from previous popes approving current science like Ptolemy's and Aristotle's, making theology compatible with that, but then expecting the science to remain fixed.

In fact, even the traditional Big Bang theory never states that the big bang was an absolute beginning from absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite. But I think creationists can still accept it as long as the "pre-bang" state is highly chaotic (no organized matter; no time arrow as consequence of maximum entropy, etc.). All religious texts have this idea of a Great Chaos before the primordial god started the creation. But we may end up finding that the correct model is something like local big bangs, where each universe sprouts out from an older universe. This leaves zero opportunity for a creator, not even a Cartesian first-mover.

"The Origin of Species has an enchantingly arid English tone to it; this somber tone was part of a deliberate effort to mark it as science and not science fiction the Star Trek of its time."

I am baffled by this. Does the writer think that Star Trek isn't science fiction?

No, she implies that the tone of the Origin of Species masks it as science when it is, according to her, actually comparable to Star Trek.

I didn't realise that creationists still existed until I was about 15. Someone told me Chuck Norris was a creationist and I googled it in disbelief.

Bruce Lee, who kicked Norris's ass, was an atheist. Ergo, creationists lose, "chuck norris facts" notwithstanding :)

Judging by her article history, she seems like more a tech columnist and not a science news writer.

I agree. Like most other typical creationists she only knows caricatures of the scientific theories she doesn't "believe" in. A scientific theory is not something one believes in, it's something you either accept or don't accept. If you don't accept it, then you should have a good reason for doing so. And no, a lack of characters and narrative in a scientific theory is not a reason to reject it because IT ISN'T A FUCKING NOVEL.

This and many of her articles are filed under "Arts and Entertainment"

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