Seattle Bubble

Have at it.

May the fittest theory survive.

Touche Alan. Here's me moving something from another thread...

For what it's worth, I am not trying to convince Robroy (or anyone else) to accept scientific principles that might clash with their religious convictions. I am objecting that he attempts to discredit a highly verified scientific by calling it baloney and then providing no evidence. It is my experience that most people who do this (on any well regarded piece of science) do so because they misunderstand the hypothesis, the theory, or even the scientific method. If Robroy or anyone else considers this "spamming" the subject, please accept my abject apology as I was only trying to present an array of evidence which collaborates with the Darwin's Theory of Evolution.



So let's leave Mr. Thomas S. Szasz be for the time being.

We are getting very off topic now, but where are you getting your information that most of Darwin's theory has been proven to be baloney? There are essentially two pillars to Darwin's theory.
1) Evolution from common decent explains the variety of life on earth.
2) Natural selection is the mechanism that directs evolution.

Every legitimate biologist (admittedly it's closer to 99%) agrees with #1, and agrees that #2 is one of the mechanisms. This isn't to say that every word of the Origin of the Species has born out. Just the fundamental premise accurately predicts genetic, behavioral, and spatial relationships between species. Here's some more information, none of which proves evolution, but the overwhelming body of evidence for and the dearth of evidence against is why evolution has earned the lofty designation as a theory.

Evolution experimentally proven in lab.
Bacteria evolves to digest nylon (a man-made substance)
Evolution of the whale is an especially interesting case study with many "missing links" found. Many of them recently. Sorry for the wiki link, it was the most concise link I could quickly find.
Here is a video detailing many well regarded transitional forms between fish and amphibian.
Human chromosome #2 is clearly a mutation of two great ape chromosomes.

But you might still have some doubts. Perhaps you believe that thermodynamics, information theory, or irreducible complexity disprove evolution.

Here's a long answer regarding the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I didn't vet this thoroughly, but it seems to be a reasonable explanation why information theory does not contradict evolution.
irreducible complexity has been rigorously debunked. Including the eye and the flagellum.

I guess what bothers me about a lot of the "intelligent design" and "evolution is nonsense" crew is that they discard a MASSIVE body of scientific evidence because it doesn't fit with their own personal beliefs. Then, when something very occasionally comes along that happens to agree with their beliefs it's immediately grabbed and held up high as the correct approach.

That's not how science works. You don't get to decide which papers or theories to "agree" with based on your own beliefs. That's one of the points of the scientific method - to reduce the effects of personal bias through peer review and other mechanisms.

As has already been mentioned, 99% of scientists are fully on-board with evolution and the main components of it. They're not idiots, and they're not on-board with it because of their own personal beliefs.

While I'm on the topic, the whole "hey, evolution is just a *theory*" thing needs a bullet put through it. There are two practical definitions of the word "theory" in use, and the common use is different to the scientific use.

Theory:
(Scientific) a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.
(Common usage) contemplation or speculation, guess or conjecture.

So when people say the "theory of evolution", it's not just a guess. Someone didn't wake up, brush their teeth, and guess about the origin of life on earth on the way to work.

I swear, if Einstein's theory of relativity disagreed with a mainstream church's supernatural beliefs or teachings from an old book, we'd have "Intelligent Gravity" as a competing theory in schools. I'm grateful that Thermodynamics has "laws" and not theories because otherwise we'd be pushing god in there too.

Prove to me that gravity isn't caused by the hand of God operating in a way that agrees with the theory of relativity. We have no experimental evidence for the cause of gravitational attraction so it must be God acting directly in the world.

It must be! Gravity and relativity are just so damn complicated that I can't explain it. So therefore it's, like, God n' stuff.

It's just a theory, man. A THEORY!

There are theories that try to explain why something happens and theories that try to explain how something behaves. The "theory of gravity" is predicts how a particular object will behave in the future. But it doesn't attempt to explain the mechanism by which gravity occurs. In that respect the theory of gravity and the theory of intelligent attraction are not incompatible.

Evolution gets a little fuzzy in this respect. The theory of evolution predicts that lifeforms will adapt to their environment, but it doesn't do a very good job of predicting exactly what form that adaptation will take. It also tries to explain why adaptation occurs -- mutations/crossover create variation in a species and natural selection carries the best variations to the next generation. The theory of evolution is pretty "hand wavy" when it comes to the details of this process. Still, progress seems to made in this area.

Theology used to deny evolution in favor of creation: "All life on Earth was created whole cloth out of dirt by God. The idea that a cow could be created from algea using small incremental changes is patently ridiculous."

As the theory of evolution was improved, this argument turned to intelligent design: "God's hand made small incremental changes in organisms to cause something that looks an awful lot like evolution to occur. The idea that algae could randomly evolve into a cow is patently ridiculous."

As experiments continue surrounding evolution, I predict will we build strong statistical models demonstrating how the algae to cow metamorphisis is possible. At that point, the influence of God will be pushed to a new area of non-understanding. Perhaps God will be credited for creating randomness itself. In any case, there will still be people who claim that God guided the random process to produce humans in the image of God. Randomly we could have ended up looking like anything, but since we are in the image of God then he must have guided it.

I believe that argument to be circular, but I've found that people who use circular reasoning to be very difficult to argue with. I've also found that they often accuse science of being circular. Participating in such arguments can be fun but it is not very useful.

For me, usefulness is the real test of any theory. Otherwise, who cares?

I think you might be making a needless distinction between a "why" and a "how". Asking "why" almost always implies intent but it can also imply mechanism, whereas "how" pretty much only implies mechanism.

Regarding why evolution feels "fuzzy", I think it's just because it deals with more complex systems than most other theories. Some scientists were studying birds on an island - I think they may have been the same finches Darwin studied on the Easter Islands - and there was a drought, which put a selective force on the birds. After the drought, the average beak length was something like 1/32 of an inch shorter on average. To predict this result, you would need to anticipate from the beginning that a shorter beak would be beneficial to these particular birds during a drought.

The other thing that seems to really throw people about evolution, is they wrongly believe it is a random processes. Selective pressures are nonrandom, and mutation rates follow well known probabilistic curves. What's interesting about evolution, by the way, is it seems so simple. That's why people of all stripes feel qualified to comment on it. It sounds straight forward, but it isn't. Remember, Newton described gravity and the motion of heavenly bodies over 200 years before Darwin described evolution.

FWIW, any religious belief which conflicts with evolution is probably equally conflicted with most of our understanding of the cosmos. Our telescopes can see stars which are billions of light years away...well, 6012 is pretty small by comparison. You could disown Einstein over this, but he just seemed so darn smart.

"How" wasn't the best word. By "how" I meant "in what manner". Falling bodies follow a predictable trajectory. That doesn't say anything about why gravity operates the way it does.

God could have created the universe "whole cloth" with photons that seemed to be coming from stars light years away magically coming into existence in the middle of space.

Such a theory is not particularly useful.

On a related topic, I'm simply amazed that there are people out there, even "scientists", that believe the earth is only 6000-10000 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism

The level to which some people will go to try and support their illogical beliefs and literal interpretation of an old book is simply amazing. There are well funded groups that exist to support these crazy 18th century beliefs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_ ... n_Research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Morris

Interesting quote from Henry Morris:

""The fact is that evolutionists believe in evolution because they want to. It is their desire at all costs to explain the origin of everything without a Creator. Evolutionism is thus intrinsically an atheistic religion.""

It seems, you'll always be limited by what is useful as a predictor. Newtonian gravity does well with falling bodies, but fails at some extremes where relativity takes over. In reality, relativity trumps, because it fully supercedes gravity. Of course, with really small things we end up in the quantum world.

It's kind of an onion where every layer down you answer a new why or how. Why don't we fall off the earth? Because of gravity. How does that help? Masses attract each other. Why do they do that? Because they "dent" space-time. How...? Essentially, every answer just creates the next chain of why/how questions.

Therein lies the appeal of "Intelligent Design" or Creationism: it's the end of the line. If you "know" God created all, then every line of questioning can end up with "that's how God intended it to be." It's the lazy way to explain things.

And in essence, this has been the way of organized religion throughout history. Limit knowledge of the masses and discourage thought.

I don't really have anything to add here, I just wanted to give a big thumbs up to this discussion, and to say I agree 100% with Notabull's first post.

People tried to come up with the best explanations that they could. The fact that some ideas were wrong is not the same as they weren't thinking. One could argue that the most damage was done by ancient Greeks, who discouraged experimentation. For millenia people simply assumed that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter ones, and no one bothered to check. It wasn't until Galileo performed a trivial experiment of dropping two balls that the means for understanding the universe was unlocked. I don't see the connection to organized religion in why no one had done that experiment before. In the Islam world, there was a decree that it was no use studying science because it was all God's will, but that did not apply in Europe. Judeo-Christian belief has always held that God presented an orderly universe that could be studied to reveal his nature (e.g. Romans 1:20).

Prior to the printing press, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe. When the cost of producing books dropped, science exploded. That was a technology change, not a change in religion, although of course a change in religion soon followed. In fact, interest in reading was greatly encouraged in Protestant countries in order that people could read the newly available Bible.