Just curious. How do you go about determining that birds are more “diverse” than mammals? We have mammals that are fully marine, mammals that can fly, mammals that live above ground, and mammals that live underground. On the face of it, it would seem that mammals are more diverse.
Are you counting the number of genera or the number of families, etc? If so, isn’t that a conclusion based on a somewhat arbitrary human classification system?
Not numbers of families - numbers of species. While these may still perhaps be viewed as somewhat arbitrary, they are more “real” than any other Linnaean rank, and are central to evolutionary concepts. Using only species, there exist over 9,500 species of birds, while there are a little over 4,200 species of mammal extant today.
Even if you wish to argue the number of niches filled by birds vs. mammals, you would still have to acknowledge the link between species and niche - two populations are not generally considered to belong to the same species if they occupy different ecological niches, even if they are otherwise morphologically similar (indeed, the mere differentiation of ecological role is often sufficient to act as a reproductive barrier that many associate with true speciation).
And if we do considering ecological roles, birds are everywhere. Top predators, herbivores, frugivores, piscivores, pollinators, insectivores, scavengers, occupying every terrestrial climate, and so on. There are burrowers, runners, diggers, filter-feeders, climbers, and so on. There are even vampiric finches. And there may be no obligate aquatics (though many penguins can be considered at least as aquatic as many pinnepids), but then you don’t find any mammals capable of breathing at over 30,000 feet above sea level, either. There are, in fact, few roles filled by mammals which aren’t currently, or have been in the past, likewise filled by birds.
Sorry to go back so far in the discussion, but I wrote the bulk of the following stuff on Saturday and when I tried to send it the server was closed for maintenance. I don’t really wish to flame Dawkins (fun though that always is!) and I don’t wish to play semantics (ditto). But the defence of Dawkins levelled by another poster (sorry not to name the handle, but time constraints blah blah) is so interpretative of what he actually penned as to misrepresent him, in my opinion. And no, I don’t think Dawkins is wicked, evil, etc. (But he would make a good lawyer!)
Allowing Dawkins to speak for himself once again, what he wrote (in fuller context) was:
I claim not to believe in evolution. It is a claim I believe to be well-founded and which you and others believe to be ill-founded.
If your interpretation (centring around the force of ‘claim’, I believe) were true, then what does Dawkins “really” mean by “ignorant”, “stupid”, and “insane”?
Dawkins is a smart chap and if he wrote ‘wicked’ (as he did) then he must have meant wicked. This should not be surprising in the least since we may assume that he is committed as a scientist to clarity and opposed to obfuscation. Note also how he carefully repeats “stupid”, “insane”, and “wicked” in the very next paragraph (as well as substituting the adjective “ignorant” by “ignorance”). He certainly meant all four descriptors.
By “wicked” it is likely that he was referring to people those people in certain states (“local traditions”) of the United States (the article was published in the New York Times) who as he himself puts it interfered “in the freedom of biology educators to teach the central theorem of their subject”.
It is most likely the case that some people who oppose evolution (and its teaching in schools) are irresponsible and make statements that are indefensible. I don’t support such people. But I’m also uncertain whether Dawkins is not open to the charge of bringing the debate down to the level of those he wishes to oppose by the use of such language as “wicked”. It is at any rate redolent of the evangelical zeal which characterises some of the debate on both sides. This is not surprising since many of us (especially in groupings) adopt a worldview, or framework, that constitutes, as Popper writes, a social, psychological and emotional bond between its devotees.
Re it being possible to believe in God as well as evolution, it would appear difficult to believe in the Judaeo-Christian God, at any rate, without believing that he created the world, including people (in his own image). Is some kind of cosmic originator being referred to by those who see no incompatibility between a belief in God and a belief in evolution? Someone who created the potentiality for all life (the “soup”) and the enabling conditions, and then let it develop from there?
We have observed evolution happening. Evolution is a fact. If you do not believe it, you are either ignorant (do not know the facts), stupid (cannot understand the facts), insane (understand the facts but think they’re a conspiracy or something), or wicked (understand the facts, but make the claim of not believing in evolution to keep others from understanding the facts).
To many scientists (myself included), one of the most wicked acts possible is to deny others access to information. This is what I believe Dawkins meant by “wicked”.
Specifically, I believe he means the ones who understand evolution, know that it exists, but still deny educators the freedom to teach the truth. He and I both hope that such people are rare (thus he says, “but I’d rather not consider that”).
Dawkins is not bringing the discussion to an evangelical level. Let me replace “evolution” in his sentence with another scientific theory which we have observed: gravity:
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in gravity, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
There is nothing evangelical about that. If you claim to not believe in gravity, you are either ignorant (meaning you do not know the facts about gravity), stupid (you cannot understand gravity), insane (you think gravity is some big conspiracy or something), or wicked (you are lying about not believing in gravity).
What you are saying here is that you do not believe man evolved from a common ancestor with apes. I think we have plenty of evidence that this isn’t true, but it isn’t required in order to believe in evolution. All it takes to believe in evolution is to believe that individuals who have a survival advantage have a better chance of surviving. Well, okay, you also have to believe that more offspring are born than can survive (that some organisms die without breeding), and that resources are limited (that’s tied in with the survival thing). Those tenets together are the theory of evolution by natural selection.
If you read this, and still choose to claim a disbelief in evolution, you’re down to stupid, insane, or wicked. I guess some ignorance is still possible, so please go to http://www.talkorigins.org/ and read until the ignorance is erased.
I’ll walk you throught it one more time, “linguist,” and maybe you’ll get it this time.
Premise:
A person tells you he does not “believe in” evolution. Since evolution is a priven fact and not a matter of opinion there are a few explanations as to why a person would say that. The possibilities are:
1.) The person is ignorant. Ignorant simply means uninformed. It is not an insult. This is the most innocent explanation. The person simply doesn’t know what the facts are. If they did know the facts, they would realize that claiming not to believe in evolution is like claiming not to believe that water freezes at 0 degrees Celcius. It is simply not a matter of opinion that evolution occurs.
2.) The person is perhaps mentally or intellectually challenged and is not capable of understanding the facts.
3.) The person is incapable of accurately perceiving reality because of some mental illness or delusion.
4.) The person is not telling the truth about what he believes. If this is the case then in may be said that the person is “wicked” simply by virtue of the fact that he is dishonest.
I would add one more category and that would be intense denial. A person may be so emotionally invested in a particular religious belief that he will simply refuse to inform himself about any other view. This would still be a form of ignorance but this kind of ignorance is willful rather than innocent.
So, in short, Dawkins is correct. Anyone who claims not to believe in evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or a liar (wicked).
Ti put it bluntly, it is impossible to know and understand the evidence and still claim a disbelief in evolution without either lying or being self-deceptive.
It might help if you change the word “evolution” in Dawkins’ statement to “oxygen.” If someone claims not to believe in oxygen then the above explanations would equally apply…and for the same reasons.
He was correct that all four descriptors are possible. It was an accurate statement of four possibilities. He also went out of his way to say that "wickedness’ was the least likely of those possibilities and that simple ignorance was the most likely.
In that case, the appellation of “wicked” would be entirely appropos.
It is, in fact, “wicked” to lie to children and corrupt their educations. It would be a genuinely harmful thing to teach religious mythology as science for multiple reasons. (It sounds like you agree, so what’s the problem?
It’s like this, Dawkins is saying that most people who claim not to believe in evolution are simply uninformed but there is a hypothetical chance that some of them might be “wicked” if they were being dishonest. I found the use of the word to be slightly facetious and the reiteration “…you’re probably not wicked…” to be a humorous negation of a hypotheical, not an accusation.
Really, you’re way too thin-skinned about this.
To give a notable example, the Catholic Church suggests that God created the universe (perhaps via the Big bang) and that evolution took it’s course but that the human soul was created by God and is unevolved.
Other Christians (and a couple of them have been posting in this thread, although you may not have realized they were Christians) See evolution, in itself, as God’s method of creation, i.e “God created evolution.”
One of the best analogies I’ve heard is simply that the Big Bang and the subsequent series of events which led to the formation of the earth, abiogensesis and evolution were simply a great cosmic “trick shot” by God, who (being God) would know exactly how to configure the Bang so that it inexorably follow the path of his own physical laws to culminate in human life.
IANAC, though and individual Christians have different views of the matter. Perhaps I should step out of the way to allow some of those who believe in theistic evolution speak for themselves.
Well, he didn’t mean all four descriptors to apply to a single person, or group of people. I agree that Dawkins’ language is unnecessarily inflammatory - perhaps he was trying to inflame a bit of a debate in the letters page of the NYT, or something like that. However, but I do believe that his central premise is almost true.
Dawkin’s proposition, reframed (as I see it) in more respectful terms. If you don’t take evolution to be true, you are either:
I believe, however, that there is another option, ignored by Dawkins, where one is:
Do you place yourself in one of these camps? Do you see the need for a new category?
I think most of the people in this thread are talking about the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic God, not merely some generic divine creator. I can’t speak for everyone here, but I used to be a Christian and believe in evolution. The way I reconciled these beliefs was by holding on to what I believed were the core values of Christianity (especially the two great commandments of Jesus). However, I discounted the most colourful accounts as allegories, fables or merely beautiful stories by which people hoped to become closer to God, with the same motivating force that guided the creation of Handel’s Messiah or mediaeval Passion plays.
“Since evolution is a proven fact…”
It isn’t. There are no proofs outside logic and pure mathematics. Perhaps it hasn’t been falsified, but that’s another thing altogether, and it hasn’t stood up to very severe tests.
Gravity is gravity. Evolution is evolution.
The different words indicate that they are different. Different kinds.
Making one analogous with the other is possible (it’s just been done), but doesn’t prove anything.
Still not quite sure how much creative power Christian evolutionists here give to God, the God of the Bible. Anyone in that category willing to share?
Re Dawkins’s use of wicked: it seems to come into the same category as the comedian who stands up and says he’s not going to tell the one about his mother-in-law and then proceeds to tell it. And remember these were no off-the-cuff comments. They were words typed on a computer, read through, edited and so forth. He knew what he was about. Maybe he was right. But you start playing God (in the sense of judging people and assigning their motivation to them) and you’re no longer doing science. You’re also on dangerous ground, both in terms of living in glasshouses and in terms of pushing debate onto emotive ground.
I deleted the rest so we could get to the heart of it.
Now you say randomness created a statistical anomaly. OK, I can understand that, but how does that anomaly create order.
We have things bouncing all over the place, then all of the sudden bam we have started life when some chemicals come together. Now what happens, how does that spark of life create order. Looks like you would come to the conclusion that the very tiny spark of life was instant intelligence. What would keep that spark alive in a random world. Bang, it gets knocked right out again.
Please answer this for me, I am very slow in learning.
Love
Are you reading the posts? Evolutiong does occur. We have observed it. I’m not even talking about “observing” as in seeing similarities between living species and/or fossils. I’m talking about observing speciation events. I’m talking about observing that more fit offspring (ones that can survive better or better attract a mate) tend to survive more often than their less fit broodmates. To deny this fact is identical to denying that gravity exists. It is identical to denying that human beings breathe oxygen. It means you’re either ignorant of the truth, unable to understand the truth, or purposefully lying about your comprehension of the truth.
The analogy is that we have observed both, and therefore believe that both exist. I wasn’t seeking to prove anything. I was seeking to clarify where evolution lies on the scale of scientific understanding.
Of course he meant it. I may sound patronising, but I mean it, too: if you claim you don’t believe in evolution, you are either ignorant (do not have the information), stupid or insane (are incapable of understanding the information), or wicked (claiming to not believe in evolution when you actually believe but want to prevent others from understanding). I am making no assumptions about your motivation; if you claim to not believe in evolution, you fall into one of these three categories. We have observed evolution occurring. Evolution happens. You can quibble about the scale of it, but the fact is that it occurs.
You have a pool of molecules, all randomly formed. Some of these molecules are arranged in such a way that they make it chemically easier for more molecules like themselves to form. These weren’t chosen, they’re just some of the billions or random molecules that have formed. Since they make copies of themselves easier to form, more molecules like them form.
However, the reaction that forms the copies isn’t perfect. The copies that are formed aren’t all identical. Some of them make it even more likely that copies of themselves will form. More of these “better” molecules will form, because they randomly happen to be arranged in such a way that they make the chemistry easier.
Repeat this process over the course of 4 billion years or so, and you have life today, some of which is even capable of thinking about how this process might occur.
I do understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand where “natural selection” became intelligence.
Randomness don’t understand “Resources are limited,” We haven’t got to this point yet. It just goes on being random, bam, boom, bang, following no intelligent pattern. Where did the intelligent pattern come from? At what point did randomness become order? Hey, I’m ignorant, teach me.
Love
I sure need a lot of fighting ignorance, all right.
Love
This is interesting. Chemicals form randomly, then the arrangement makes it easier for more molecules to form. Here you have introduced intelligence. Randomness doesn’t know “easier” from adam. Randomness is just randomness. We have randomness or we don’t.
I still would like to know exactly where and when intelligence enters the picture. The world we live in shows great cooperation between all its elements. Where did this start, or did we find a major contradiction in scientific theory.
Love
I don’t follow what you’re asking. There already was order in the universe before life started. The first signs of order occur shortly after the Big Bang, billions of years before Earth existed. The laws of nature that could create life using amino acids under the right conditions already existed.
The first life was not intelligent. Single cells are too small to be intelligent. They simply react to their environment. Plants exhibit no signs of intelligence. Lower multicellular animals are limited to what they can learn acting more on instinct. We only start to see signs of intelligence in higher order multicellular animals.
I don’t understand what you are asking about keeping a spark alive in a random world. A sufficient number of early forms of life came into being so that obviously some survived and the process of evolution began.
This is more for the others reading this thread than for Lekatt, but maybe Lekatt will read this and learn, as well, so it’s worth a try.
No, I haven’t introduced intelligence, I’ve introduced a catalyst. The chemicals aren’t trying to make it easier. They don’t know that they’re making it easier. There existance just makes the reactions happen more easily, because of their random configuration. It isn’t that the molecules somehow now know that it’s easier; it’s that the probability of the chemicals forming has been increased. That’s what I mean by easier. Please, by all means, let me know if anything else in that scenario is unclear.
These are two entirely different points.
As for “where and when” intelligence enters the picture, I have no idea. I wasn’t there. Heck, there are even disagreements about how to define intelligence (are apes intelligent? what about dogs? etc). However, at some point far down the line from my random molecule example an organism was born that was able to better figure out how to get food. This gave that organism a higher probability of surviving, and therefore allowed it to outcompete other similar organisms. The organism passed on its survival advantage to its offspring, which, over the course of hundreds of generations, became even better at figuring out survival. Eventually, it led to man. Of course, (again depending on how you define intelligence) that occurred several times, leading to other intelligences such as dolphins or parrots or whatever else you might define as intelligent.
As for the cooperation, this is simply because cooperation gave a survival advantage to all of the cooperating members. Bees fertilized flowers, which led to greater survival for both bees and flowers, and therefore they evolved to help each other even more. On a more general sense, land animals were able to evolve because land plants had already colonized the land, providing nutrients to the emerging animals. I don’t know what else you mean by “great cooperation”, so that’s as much as I can go into it right now.
And I do. However, “his image” (to me) is that of a being capable of intelligence, will, love, (probably humor), and a number of other characteristics. I have no concept of an “image” of God that requires a four-appendage, bipedal, carbon-based life form with mammalian characteristics divided into two sexes. (Is God also female? Or, are females not made in the image of God?)
As the author of all, God is surely responsible for Creation. However, the techniques and methodology employed within that Creation are ascertainable only through science (unless your prayers have a direct pip
Would you say that God created the Earth (and the Universe) and then created the enabling conditions for life (flora and fauna) to first appear and then diversify? After that, they got on with it over a period of many millions of years.
Well, if you wanted to, you could say that God caused the Big Bang, then just stood back from there. That’s almost the Catholic Church’s position nowadays. They view the Big Bang as a definite creation event. And whether we’re talking about the Big Bang, abiogenesis or evolution, we’re talking about a timeframe in the billions of years.
So what’s your current view on the matter, bodswood? Are you satisfied with the evidence for evolution? Do you still see some logical problems?
“Well, if you wanted to, you could say that God caused the Big Bang, then just stood back from there. That’s almost the Catholic Church’s position nowadays. They view the Big Bang as a definite creation event. And whether we’re talking about the Big Bang, abiogenesis or evolution, we’re talking about a timeframe in the billions of years.”
But where did that pesky primeval atom come from? Who/what created/made it?
“So what’s your current view on the matter, bodswood? Are you satisfied with the evidence for evolution? Do you still see some logical problems?”
You damn near converted me, mate! I’ve got one or two questions arising from my homework studying talkorigins. I’ll bring 'em here when I’m ready.
Oops! I lie. I gave one already above re the atom. Awaiting answers eagerly as ever. Guesses accepted.
I’m rearranging your post to make it easier to reply to. I’m not trying to change what bodswood is saying so please read his original post above 
Really? Great to hear! I’ll be happy to do my best to answer your questions… but see below
Well, the current theory is that the first atom coalesced out of the energy of the Big Bang… but I assume you really meant “where did the energy of the Big Bang come from?” or “where did the matter-energy contained in the singularity of the Big Bang come from?” To that, I have to answer “I don’t know.” Did a deity put it there? Maybe. My favorite explanation is that it always existed in some form or another. That makes more sense to me than nonexistance. But right now we don’t know, and I don’t know that we ever will. I’m willing to accept that, as annoying as it may be. I am not willing to put faith in any one guess over another (a deity vs. always existing, for example); I might favor one, but I won’t put belief in a guess unless/until I’m given evidence that one of the possibilities is more likely.
bodswood, you run into the same problems when you ask about the origins of God. Who put him there? Where did he come from? He can’t always have just been. The difference is that science will probably have an answer one day. However, without prayer, fundies like yourself will have to wait for the rapture to know anymore than you do now. With prayer, you’ll never be sure whether you’re delusional and hallucinatory or right.