I've always found that if someone confronts me over strongly held beliefs that I don't want to debate, I simply tilt my head to the side and in a quiet voice say "Really, seriously, f$$$ off"
end of debate.
I find collapsing on to the ground, curling up into the fetal position and crying uncontrollably works better.
But to each his own.
__________________ Allskonar fyrir Aumingja!!
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@Shades: I think you have a misconception about the word "species" that is causing a great deal of misunderstanding. We invented the word species. To assume that a word we invented long before we knew anything about genetics informs evolutionary processes about where to stop or how to function is a little silly. In fact, philosophers of science and scientists themselves argue a great deal about what a "species" actually even is. There are many groups of individuals that seem like they should warrant the title "species" that, were we to grant them it, would require changing the definition of species in such a way that groups of individuals that we don't want to call species are now species. The same is true on the exclusionary side of the coin. In short, as of right now, any criteria we might use to describe what sorts of things count as species is either too inclusive or too exclusive.
The reason for this is that, like many other problems in philosophy, the world does not conform to our linguistic expectations. Just because we have a word "species" doesn't mean the world works in such a way. Consequently, to say that species are somehow locked in and "microevolution" (whatever that is) can't exceed the "species boundary" is looking at the world language-down instead of facts-up.
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I think that this is one of several problems. A principle issue that prevents understanding among ID proponents is a more global philosophical problem that impacts a variety of areas, and that is the matter of hermeneutics. More specifically, people generally presume that their own interpretation of the world (this includes science, language, society, etc.) is somehow universally fixed and not prone to any sort of change. When in actual fact, change across the spectrum in practically every discipline is both natural and prevalent. In my discussions with creationists and IDers it is my impression that they largely suffer from a marriage to arguments from incredulity, by which they cannot possibly imagine that things are contrary to how they appear, or to how how we make "common sense" of them.
An example of how this works out may be illustrated from the interesting history of sexuality in the Western world: our modern attitudes towards gender and sex have had a huge impact on our perception of human relationships, social cues, children, and even matters of morality and law. There was a time when sex was perceived almost exclusively as a function for either reproduction or the assertion of power. Among ancient Mesopotamian / Assyrian cultures from which we are descended, it was completely divorced from any expression of emotion or what we would consider affection (certainly, affection was often a common response within sexual relationships, but this was entirely secondary): for this reason, social cues were created to confine sex to a (usually polygamous) marriage relationship, and laws were defined along these lines to eliminate gratuitous sexual activity, or "non-productive" (read: "homosexual") sexuality. Through the passage of time, and as human cultural interaction has evolved, the relationship between men and women has adapted along the same lines, and to include significant changes to our attitudes with regards to sexuality: No longer is it merely a reproductive activity. In fact, in the modern world, reproduction seems to actually have become much more of a consequence as opposed to the purpose for sex. Social cues and ideas with regards to courtship, marriage, and family have changed significantly as a result, to the point at which now their primary purposes have much more to do with affection and devotion in their own rights, and much less to do with tribal solidarity. This in turn has caused a contemporary debate with regards to the very definition of marriage, and whether or not it should be restricted along gender lines.
All that said, the point in this is to illustrate how much our interpretation of just one part of the world can so dramatically affect our understanding of the way things are. Antiquated ideas about sex informed modern conceptions, and some of these still survive in one form or another, but the purpose of many of these do not accord with how sex functions in our society today.
How does this relate to IDers? Basically, the rejection of evolution is informed by a sense of incredulity that is in turn caused by a poor understanding of how our understanding of the world has so dramatically changed. I think that it is probably fair to argue that the vast majority of IDers oppose evolution in principle, and on the basis of a flawed or antiquated interpretation of how the world works. They maintain a commitment to an ideal that is challenged by the implications of evolution, and are thus forced to reject evolution as a result. By way of analogy: For those for whom homosexuality is wrong or unnatural, it is so axiomatically. However, the circumstances upon which this axiom were founded (that it was fundamental to protect the ancient idea of "family" and the instrument of reproduction) have changed so dramatically, that the axiom itself has become irrelevant. This is much less a matter of science than it is of philosophy. If we could convince IDers—and people in general—of their own susceptibility to hermeneutical shifts, would it become a more viable task to convince them of the soundness of evolution?
... or am I rambling?....
This is very important to understand, for so many reasons. The basic principles behind this argument go so much further than merely discussing evolution, and how/if it works. Take another loaded, politicized argument out there right now, Global Warming. Something missing from that argument is the underlying assumption that the world is unchanging, and what it is now by definition must be the best way it could be. Any change is bad.
I'm also quite struck by how many from the Athiest point of view see religion as also unchanging. As if religion the way it is is the way it always has been, and that it cannot adjust to accommodate many of the issues that it has been brought to task on. Those of you who embrace Atheism as a way of fighting against certain trends you find troubling, such as creationism or chauvinism, or homophobia or what have you, should know that what we have now isn't the be all and end all of religion, or even Christianity. Thank God. There are many Christians that share the same concerns you do. And they don't necessarily have to resort to ID in order to believe both, even if that is the way they are trying to do so.
If you're expecting a donkey to evolve from a human then you don't understand what evolution is in the first place. If a donkey evolved from a human then that would disprove evolution.
How does something evolving disprove evolution? It could disprove current theories but evolution can't disprove evolution.
They maintain a commitment to an ideal that is challenged by the implications of evolution, and are thus forced to reject evolution as a result.
I think that's it in a nutshell. Most people I discuss evolution with aren't actually interested in really understanding it (even if only to argue against it better), and if asked what evidence would change their mind, they either cannot answer, or give nonsense answers that would actually go against evolution anyway. What they are after is to confirm their bias, or enter discussions to argue and score rhetorical points rather than actually understand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
I think that it is probably fair to argue that the vast majority of IDers oppose evolution in principle, and on the basis of a flawed or antiquated interpretation of how the world works. They maintain a commitment to an ideal that is challenged by the implications of evolution, and are thus forced to reject evolution as a result.
Just so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
If we could convince IDers—and people in general—of their own susceptibility to hermeneutical shifts, would it become a more viable task to convince them of the soundness of evolution?
... or am I rambling?....
Overactive agency detection, confirmation bias, the way our memory works, it's all slanted towards a sense of being right, so I don't know if you can convince people of the first one, it'll just have to develop.
Kind of like rejection of evolution on the basis of it threatening their beliefs, it'll just have to seep out of society naturally over time like a geocentric solar system, a flat earth, slavery, etc..
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Originally Posted by Knalus
Something missing from that argument is the underlying assumption that the world is unchanging, and what it is now by definition must be the best way it could be. Any change is bad.
Well any discussion about that, best is self centered.. Best meaning best for us, since that's what we evolved in. Life itself will of course march on, serious negative impact or no.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Knalus
Those of you who embrace Atheism as a way of fighting against certain trends you find troubling, such as creationism or chauvinism, or homophobia or what have you, should know that what we have now isn't the be all and end all of religion, or even Christianity.
Do people embrace atheism to fight against those things? I don't know if I've met any that are atheists for that reason.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
Can't you just call them loudmouth atheists? Militant is such a horribly misused word in this case.
By the way do you get offended when people with opposing political views passionately argue them with you?
Loudmouth works for me, labels don't matter. I was using the nomenclature from prior posts (eg #151). My only point was that there are atheists and theists who are loud, obnoxious, and yes, even militant. It's not reasonable to judge either group by the lunatic fringe, in my opinion, as I know rational people who I respect in both groups.
My point wasn't that "passionately arguing" something is a poor idea. If I didn't wish to discuss these things I would stay out of these threads. But there is a time and a place for everything. The example I was referring to was a loud (and drunk) post-grad at a dinner party, who had been asked by the hostess to control himself numerous times. He was passionate about his beliefs, or non-beliefs, or lack of beliefs, or whatever, but he expressed that passion in a very non-constructive way.
My ability to remain rational when argued with (about politics, religion, or anything else) is significant. Usually saying to someone in a quiet voice that "you're being irrational and raising your voice, while I'm remaining calm" is effective, but not always. It works especially well when they're accusing you of being illogical.
Richard Dawkins is the worst thing to happen to Atheists. "Let's join together, essentially creating a religion about hating religion to stop tyranny."
This is what happens when people join together to "eliminate" something. Stupidity wins out.
Richard Dawkins is awesome. Here's a well-respected scientist secure in academic legitimacy publicly denouncing foolishness.
Atheists can't possibly be tyrannical until such time there are 2.4 buildings devoted to the cause within a typical 10 mile square urban quadrant.
Last edited by Reggie Dunlop; 07-14-2011 at 11:39 PM.
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Richard Dawkins is the worst thing to happen to Atheists. "Let's join together, essentially creating a religion about hating religion to stop tyranny."
This is what happens when people join together to "eliminate" something. Stupidity wins out.
I'm all for stopping tyranny that uses religion as a guise to justify stoning women because they get raped, and such.
I think the real problem is that sensible people anywhere in the world are not problems while jerks, bigots, and aggressive dullards are a problem anywhere in the world. Getting rid of religion isn't going to eliminate jerks, bigots and aggressive dullards, it will just lead to more jerks, bigots and aggressive dullards who are atheist.
While I'm an atheist and would be happy enough to see religions done away with, I don't believe for a second that it's going to solve the problem of some people just not being very bright or friendly.
__________________
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"
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So sad. You hear the term "selective evolution" and disregard what she was actually saying.
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Through the process of selection evolution we went from a virus that made a crummy battery, to a virus that made a good battery, to a virus that made a record breaking high powered battery
So in the end, it was still a virus. Good grief. You evolutionists will latch onto anything.
Time. The earth is 5 billion years old. Life first emerged 3 billion years ago. Do you or any ID people have any clue how many generations of life that is? How LONG that is?
Until you accept the hard scientific truth that the earth is only 10,000 years old you won't be able to understand why ID is the answer to the mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything.
oh wait, that answer is 42.
(I hope I don't need to put that in green).
Not only are we talking about a long time to make such evolutionary changes to a species (the length of time is mind bogglingly big, sort of like how big space is) you are talking about changes that are brought about because of specific stresses put on the species. It's hard to imagine we know enough about anything to re-create a specific string of stresses in a laboratory even over eons to go from single celled to mulit-celled and on. That isn't proof that evolution and mutation can't get it done...it's only "proof" that our knowledge while vast is still likely insignificant. If our knowlege of the universe and planet was anywhere near complete, we wouldn't have a breaking science news thread with daily updates.
So in the end, it was still a virus. Good grief. You evolutionists will latch onto anything.
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Evolution has not been, and cannot be, proved. We cannot even see evolution (beyond trivially small change), much less test it experimentally.
Response:
Nothing in the real world can be proved with absolute certainty. However, high degrees of certainty can be reached. In the case of evolution, we have huge amounts of data from diverse fields. Extensive evidence exists in all of the following different forms (Theobald 2004). Each new piece of evidence tests the rest.
All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritability, catalysis, and metabolism.
Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a unique, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.
Different lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.
Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transitional forms in the fossil record.
The fossils appear in a chronological order, showing change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years and inconsistent with sudden creation.
Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.
Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestor but lost in the organism's immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms' evolutionary histories.
Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism's evolution. For example, as embryos whales and many snakes develop hind limbs that are reabsorbed before birth.
The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. Squirrel diversity coincides with tectonic and sea level changes (Mercer and Roth 2003). Such consistency still holds when the distribution of fossil species is included.
Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and thus similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.
The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70 percent, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.
When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level, too.
The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.
Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much DNA is nonfunctional.
Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.
The day-to-day aspects of evolution -- heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection -- are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent.
Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies (Benner et al. 2002).
The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.
4 No One Has Ever Seen Evolution Happen Evolution is a historical science confirmed by the fact that so many independent lines of evidence converge to this single conclusion. Independent sets of data from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics, molecular biology, developmental biology, embryology, population genetics, genome sequencing, and many other sciences each point to the conclusion that life evolved. Creationists demand “just one fossil transitional form” that shows evolution. But evolution is not proved through a single fossil. It is proved through a convergence of fossils, along with a convergence of genetic comparisons between species, and a convergence of anatomical and physiological comparisons between species, and many other lines of inquiry. (In fact we can see evolution happen—especially among organisms with short reproductive cycles that are subject to extreme environmental pressures. Knowledge of the evolution of viruses and bacteria is vital to medical science.)
I think the real problem is that sensible people anywhere in the world are not problems while jerks, bigots, and aggressive dullards are a problem anywhere in the world. Getting rid of religion isn't going to eliminate jerks, bigots and aggressive dullards, it will just lead to more jerks, bigots and aggressive dullards who are atheist.
This was what I was trying to say, put more succinctly. There are reasonable and unreasonable atheists, and reasonable and unreasonable theists. I don't think the conversion of all atheists to theists would fix the world, and neither would the conversion of all theists to atheists. Those who are unreasonable and prone to doing ridiculous things would still do them.
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Unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. - Michael Ruse
Richard Dawkins also said this in his book
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"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) both reject this alternative." (Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996, p. 229-230)
Now who is really twisting things to fit their point of view?
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"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion...it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ...Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational intermediates between documented fossil species." (Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89)
Another evolutionist:
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We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." - Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review, January 9, 1997
Cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door? Is that really unbiased research? hahah, yeah.
Haeckel's works, even though proven to be a fraud now, still is being taught as fact in biology textbooks. Why all this misinformation being taught if there is still so much overwhelming evidence?
