Especially since God and evolution can both logically exist.
If you mean the fact of evolution, ie. that species die out and other species which didn’t exist beforehand take their place, then you would indeed have to be monumentally solipsistic or obtuse to think it unlikely.
The entire explanation for this fact occasionally undergoes revision, like any other healthy and robust theory such as Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. Some people confuse this for “wrongness”, until they actually study it.
Because of a belief that there exists a conspiracy of sorts that both supports the teaching of evolution and suppresses evidence that evolution doesn’t happen. This consporacy is motivated by keeping their snug jobs teaching biology and recruiting sould for Satan to torure in Hell.
See: Jack Chick
I don’t believe in evolution, but I do accept it as scientific fact. It may be just a semantical difference, but I feel it’s a valid one.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know why people don’t accept it. I think it has to do with certain “Christian” fundamentalists who have convientally forgotten about a commandment, in order to sell stuff and collect followers…
It’s easy: evolution is a subtle enough concept that it took until only 300 years ago for it even to pop up as a notion.
Aristotelian science/logic/observation suggest that, while individuals are “plastic,” species are very, very concrete. There is an “ideal” cow from which all real cows are variants. This ideal is unchanging and eternal.
You need to learn a lot about the world for this way of thinking to be thrown over. The key insight, in fact, wasn’t from biology at all, but from geology, as people began to grasp the immense age of the earth. Once people realized that mountains weren’t permanent, other hallmarks of “eternity” also came into question.
Even today, I have great sympathy for “naive” creationists. (i.e., anyone who hasn’t actually been taught the principles of biology.) Anyone who has grown up on a farm knows: sheep don’t mate with cows, and cows don’t mate with horses.
(Farmboys occasionally mate with sheep, but that’s a different kettle of oats…)
Trinopus
Make the right decision, do the right thing! What are you going to do Lucy? Write the report! Write the report!
But I don’t believe in evolution! This is crazy!
Because it’s counter-intuitive.
As Trinopus points out, sheep mate with sheep, and they produce… sheep. Cows with cows produce cows. It’s not counterintuitive to imagine a species improving – only the fastest rabbits survive to breed, so over time, rabbits get faster – but it doesn’t address how a little tiny prehistoric rat-like mammal can produce primates. It’s absurd on the face of it. To those that haven’t studied, sheep have always been sheep, cows always cows, rats always rats – even if they were slower/larger/smaller/whatever in the distant past.
Once you have the tools to look at the issue in more depth, and with an understanding of DNA and how macroevolution correctly predicts a unique, historical universal phylogenetic tree, of course, it starts to make a bit more sense. But you can’t look at a sheep and see DNA.
One is told that it is a pack of lies by those who present themselves as authorities on the matter. One is further told “this is what those evil anti-religion atheistic evolutionary monkey scientists will try to tell you. And here’s why it’s false” and similar things.
IOW, one is told things about it that are not true, and sometimes that to believe that evolution is valid goes against one’s religion. Etc. There are a few threads in GD and the Pit atm (though they may be off page 1 by now) that deal with this on a more scientific basis.
'kay I’ll try and post this in intelligible English … I don’t believe in the theory of evolution - or at least what I understand to be evolution - because it doesn’t make sense to me. I was under the impression that evolution was “survival of the fittest” ie the fittest, best looking, of the species were the ones who reproduced, so therefore the offspring should be fit and good looking, but that doesn’t happen … Or am I just imagining it?
Aristotle? I think you mixed plasticity with play-dough.
cough
Plato had ideal eternal forms, that is.
If your counter-argument to evolution is that “offspring should be fit and good looking” then, yes, you are just imagining it (assuming that the “it” in your final sentence refers to “what I understand to be evolution”).
How would you define best-looking? Most svelte elephant? Leopard with the longest fur? Sloth with the shade of mold most resembling Hunter Green?
There’s a really good book that explains the complexity of animals and how evolution works. Its called The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. I suggest all of you read it. It is one of the most in depth explainations of how evolution works.
As Bricker was trying to explain, evolution takes such a long time to show results, that its hard for humans to concieve the notion because our lifespans are less than 100 years. Additionally, look at the transition between a wolf and a poodle. Humans have breeded wolves into another species. Humans were the ones who acted as natural selection would have (probably not in the same direction), but nonetheless, have caused an evolution to occur. Its proven… given more time you can get animals that are much farther apart in familiarity.
If you got this from a biology teacher, then I suggest you go back and pour a bottle of ink over his/her head (then report the person to the school board).
(First off, “survival of the fittest” was a catch phrase used by Spencer to “sell” the concept and only included by Darwin in later editions of his Origin of Species, so it does not really express Darwin’s ideas, just a popularizing notion of them.)
As to the meaning of the phrase in context, it means that any time there is a change in physiology from parent to child that gives the child an advantage for survival, that child will have a better chance of success and will be more likely to live long enough to produce offspring that will, in turn pass along the change. If enough (great-great-. . .)grandchildren have this trait, they will tend to be more successful at having children than other individuals that do not have the trait and they will produce even more descendants so that, eventually, the trait will occur in all the individuals in the species–who have been more successful at surviving (and breeding) than those who did not have the trait.
The trait is not beauty (although peacocks may be an exampole of a special case for that*); it can be anything. A change in a chemical in muscles that allows a prey to run just a little bit faster than the local predator. A change in the chemical signal to create seeds so that in some years a tree produces millions of seeds and the following year it produces very few in a process called masting. There are innumerable ways to improve a species.
If you look around at humans, you will note that, while pretty people are able to find mates, the rest of us do not stand around for the rest of our lives refusing to breed because we did not get a “pretty” mate–our sex drives tell us to go out and find someone else.
- (One speculation regarding peacock plumage is that a healthy bird that is fast enough and smart enough to find food while not being eaten will develop a luxurious tail, while a diseased bird or one that cannot find enough food will have a more draggly tail, so peahens are more receptive to advances from the birds with the best plumage.)
aaaacckkk
I grabbed the wrong link for masting, and my correct site is corrupted.
Masting involves producing enormous amounts of seeds (nuts) so that howver many critters are eating them, some will germinate. Periodically, the tree produces far fewer seeds/nuts, starving the seed eaters so that at the next masting, there will be fewer animals to destroy seeds and the many seeds will have a better chance to survive.
There’s a grain of truth in there, but only a grain; some characteristics are selected on the basis of what is good-looking, the only trouble is that ‘good looking’ is not absolutely defined - for example - to a female grouse, red pulsating rubbery inflatable neck pouches are just sooooo sexy on a male, the bigger and more gelatinously quivering, the better. Other animals (such as humans) don’t favour them - a female grouse, were it sentient, capable of speech and disbelieving of evolution, would ask you “Survival of the fittest means that the fittest, best looking of the species are the ones to reproduce, so why are male humans so ugly with no pulsating red inflatable neck pouches?”
Also important are the people the fundamentalist Christians consider authorities.
You can line up stuffy, “liberal” professors to talk about biology, geology, and astrophysics till ya drop, but these aren’t the people that have the respect and admiration of the creationist crowd. They listen to and trust familiar sources - family, friends, and religious leaders. A rational but very subtle argument simply cannot stand to an entire community of belief that continually reinforces its validity in the minds of the community members.
I think most of us have seen many times on this board what happens when a person leaves the comfort of that community to enter an environment where such uncritical thinking is not permitted to continue unchecked. The falsehoods that are encouraged in a fundamentalist community are not tolerated here, making this environment hostile to the creationist on a personal level.
It’s a tough nut to crack, and in the end it means that most of them will never be convinced without a radical change in their local communities, which isn’t likely to occur.
For the love of Mike, cows do NOT mate with cows, they mate with bulls. Cow is a term for an adult female animal that should not be used for any individual of the species. Totally off topic, I know, and I apologize, but I could not let this pass. If you have little kids, I hope–likely in vain–that you correct them when they speak of “baby cows” and “Daddy cows”.
**
Well, maybe you can’t see DNA, but you can often see other powerful physical evidence that evolution took place. Fossils showing the gradual change of features over time is fairly convincing, to me at least. Present-day taxa of closely related animals such as the different types of cats, or the different members of the dog family tells me that that each group descended from a common ancestor; the similarities that are common to dogs and cats tells me that those two founding species were themselves descended from an earlier common ancestor. I realize I’m oversimplifying the workings of evolution here, but to me it simply seems the simplest and most likely explanation of how we came to be.
One thing about evolution is that it is not an absolute, cut-and-dried tale of this species definitely having evolved into that species. The experts’ theories of exactly how things evolved changes all the time as new evidence is brought to light, and new ways are conceived for looking at old evidence. Which may be a big problem for people that want a definite answer about these things.
Bravo to you tomndebb. Considering the number of these threads that pop up every month, the level of commitment you exhibit to fulfilling the stated goals of this board is admirable.
::tips hat::
Nicely punned!
I tho’t that Ari-baby accepted the notion of Platonic ideals… So, at risk of a spin-off topic… Did he accept them? Reject them? Or never address 'em at all?
I’ve read some Plato, although it made my teeth hurt… I couldn’t get four pages into Aristotle…
For instance, I just whipped open the Project Gutenberg copy of “Ethics” and flailed around for a while… Didn’t take me seven minutes to find this little gem:
“It is plain then that the good or ill fortunes of their friends do affect the dead somewhat: but in such kind and degree as either to make the happy unhappy nor produce any other such effect.”
Argh! What does it even mean? I swear, it looks like something someone put together via a “travesty generator.”
I mean, Zeus! I can make this stuff up! “The good, wherein the best is partaken, surpasses the worst, of which the ill and unlovely completes the round, excels it in every characteristic, whereas the unfavored, being in no part the gift of the gods, is the lesser measure.”
But…I digress…
Trinopus