There is a well known distinction between and among fiscal conservatives, small/limited government conservatives, social conservatives and the theocratic types.
Evolution researchers do not deal with the origins of life. (Evolutionist is a word that implies a dogma and creationists prefer to apply it to the scientists, unfortunately for the creationists there are also theist evolutionists)
Why not? Natural selection is about context. It’s the same overall ideas that more recently (relatively speaking) we see the differences between various species of cat. The “need” is provided by environment and competition; it’s not a matter of whether it can survive, whether it can reproduce, but whether there are better variants of it, or better completely different things, that are better at it that mean there’s less food or room to survive and reproduce. It doesn’t matter if it can do a thing; what matters is if it does it better or worse compared to the competition.
That there are highly complex systems is because once they were just complex, and before that they were simple, and before that they were rudimentary. And that changed because the changes granted a benefit to the creatures that had them, in the context of competition and environment.
Well, here’s the point at which I say i’m not a biologist and so won’t be able to give you detailed explanations of how those specific mechanisms evolved.
That said, I would like to ask a question of you; why do you select those particular points as your examples of hard-to-believe things? Are there things you think are comparitively easy to swallow?
I know. This is what I’m trying to say is the main problem with most of the people who are scornful of evolution: they do mistakenly think it deals with the origins of life. (And IMO this is largely because so many evolutionists are scornful and dismissive of people who believe in God. And if God didn’t create life, what other explanation can there be but that it erupted and develped all on its own?)
There is no such idea in evolutionary biology. For one thing, evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. It only describes what happened after life got started. For another thing, there is no notion or hypothesis in any part of biology that a cell just “sparked” into existence. The development of cells was a long, layered process with several intermediate steps, not just a single step or a single cell.
On again, you are ignoring that there are theistic evolutionists.
But the main point remains that we have a peculiar kind of creationists that pretend that there is an ongoing controversy in science and that therefore we should “teach the controversy”.
Creationists are **lying **here. You bet that creationists deserve more than scorn when they try to take their church dogmas into the classrooms.
No, there are a great many other things I could have listed also. Those just came most readily to mind as being things whose complexity and function everyone is familiar with and whose development seems not only highly unlikely but unnecesary in terms of having sprung up on their own, and mostly as a matter of convenience. Take eyes for example: how on earth would eyeballs and flexible lenses and muscles to move them and retinas to be focused on and optic nerves leading to the brain all develop out of nowhere just because it would be handy for an organism to see what was going on? I would think the organism would either die out or continue to get along as it always had long before anything as complex and seemingly intelligently designed as eyesight ever came into being.
Why do you persist in using the obviously derogatory term “evolutionists”? There are the vast majority of scientists that recognize the reality of evolution, and the few that refuse to accept that evidence.
Do you label people that accept the Theory of Relativity “relativists”, or call those who accept that 2=2+4 “mathists”?
No, I’m saying that theistic evolutionists are virtually invisible to the public eye and most people aren’t aware of them.
About the only things one hears from evolutionists on the public stage are about how valid evolution is and how stupid people who believe in God are, so it appears to most God-believers that evolutionists are saying that there is no God and evolution proves it.
Am I mistaken or has this particular example been discussed(and explained thoroughly) a few times before on this board?
Could you perhaps provide a few cites from prominent scientists who said things like this in a public forum?
No degrogatory meaning is intended. I believe in evolution myself, up to a point. What would you call them?
(And yes, I would call people who accept the Theory of Relativity “Relativists,” just like I call believers in Objectivism “Objectivists,” thus I don’t see where your ire is coming from.)
If you can show where I ever said anything about scientists making such pronouncements, I would be happy to.
Interestingly enough, the evolution of eyesight is one of the specific cases I was taught in high school level biology. I think the problem with your question is that those things didn’t just pop up out of nowhere - they built upon less impressive, less efficient versions of what they were. So you don’t have blind fish, blind fish, fish with complex, interdependent working eyes. You get a blind fish, and then maybe a fish with a slightly light sensitive spot, and then a fish with a yet more sensitive one, and so on and so forth. There are, literally, billions upon billions of years, billions upon billions of generations, for all this to add up in.
As for dying out - the very point of natural selection is that those traits which helped are the ones that survived. If that incredibly rudimentary light-sensitive spot on precursor fish helped it to survive in some way, then those with them are going to survive more, and survive longer, than the ones that don’t. You talk about convenience as if it’s trivial, but of course it matters. If there’s a shop selling a product you regularly buy 10 miles away, and then another shop with that same item opens up just 2 miles away, all things being equal, you’re going to go to the more convenient location to get your product. The nearby shop will survive better than the far shop, because it has properties which make it more convenient, more able to survive in the context of you as a shopper and the competition.
What bee has gotten under your bonnet? Do you expect that I’m aware of and fully versed in every thread that has appeared on this message board?
I’m trying to explain why people such as Palin and other believers in God appear to believe that way rather than in evolution to explain life on this planet.
You, however, seem to be wanting to fight some battle I’m not even vaguely aware of, so I’d appreciate it if you’d at least let me know what your problem is.
No, even having a simple detector of light and darkness is an advantage over critters that do not have even a simple photoreceptor:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/the_eye_as_a_contingent_divers.php
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/12/evolution_of_vertebrate_eyes.php
So when you referred to “evolutionists on the public stage”, you were talking about…?
Actually, all I was doing was asking if anyone could direct me to previous threads discussing your example, because I was pretty sure it had been covered before and it would suit us better than rehashing arguments that had already been made.
:rolleyes:
As a lapsed Catholic (and as a part of one of the biggest Christian denominations in the USA) I can tell you that most are aware of them.
:rolleyes::rolleyes:
No, only a sub set of creationists are stupid. (The ones that want to put creationism in schools) That subset (like Palin) does want to convince all Americans that what the smack-downs that they deservedly get on school and on the courts applies to **all **people of faith. Those creationists are also lying.
A mere two thousand years is very nearly trivial compared to human history’s longest-running, most popular religion / belief “system”, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a very good name. Pascal Boyer referred to it as “witchcraft” in his engrossing (if unduly repetitive) book Religion Explained, but at least here in the Western world that term is too strongly associated with old hags and broomsticks and the like to be properly understood by the general public. It is composed of a vast grab bag of beliefs centered on an imagined sense of hidden, mystical agency behind events, arising from the subjects / objects – physical or otherwise – around us which are thought to be imbued with the “breath” of powerful forces. A central tenet is that these hidden forces can be subtly manipulated by those possessing the relevant gnosis, many of whom are believed to be transcendent or can only be described using vastly different ontologies than our own, the effects of which are variously revealed in “luck”, in the “evil eye”, in our ancestors’ will or respect, in specially designated animals, in the “Word of God”, in “fate”, in “horoscopes”, in “psychic powers”, in “prophecy”, in “church”, in “alien abductions”, etc., etc.
You Christians (along with many others) have artificially added a great deal of subtle intellectual heft to the same root concept and refer to it in English as spirit.
This “religion” is at least as old as Homo sapiens, and remains the dominant belief system in the world even today throughout the world. Consider the enormous current popularity in the West of vampires, zombies, the paranormal, ghosts, Mayan death calendars, etc. Consider such popular books as “The Celestine Prophecy”, “The Holy Bible”, “The Secret”, and “The Qur’an”. All just different representations of the belief in spiritus.
Applying what we have learned from that background to Sarah Palin’s and so many others’ belief that their lives can be, or are being, “guided” by “the spirit of God”, we can observe that what began as animism is still the preeminent foundation of that worldview. Humanity has layered astonishingly complex, subtle, and often extremely beautiful intellectual edifices on top of animism, but ultimately, animism it plainly remains.
And the extreme danger of secular power in the hands of people with that worldview telling us that their lives have been “taken over” and are now “in God’s hands” is that their decision-making has thus become virtually unquestionable! Just as George W. Bush took us into an utterly unjust war in Iraq because he was certain that God had told him to do so (God was wrong about WMDs, too, apparently), if listening to secular advice and following secular laws and heeding the secular democratic will conflicts with “God’s will”, guess who gets the short end of the straw and suffers “God’s wrath”?