Well, that person is stupid. They may be well trained in certain areas, they may be clever about some things but to believe in the literal truth of collections of ancient myths, even by unquestioning default, is stupid.
I could look in a thesaurus but ‘stupid’ is good enough for me. People who believe this should have their views treated with contempt. These beliefs should be reviled and mocked.
Belief in ancient dogma’s & the dreadful human behaviours they encourage, from Deuteronomy to practically the entire Koran, is dangerously stupid as Islamic terrorists, pro-life anti-stem cell research fanatics, abortion clinic bombers etc show.
Species of living things can be grouped together; the different kinds of cats and cat-like animals, although clearly forming distinct species, have striking similarities in anatomy and behavior. (And within the group of cat-like animals, lions and leopards and tigers can be grouped together, while housecats can be grouped with certain small wild cats, and all the lynxes and bobcats form a tight subgroup, etc.) The cat-like animals in turn share certain basic similarities with other groups of carnivores (bears, or the wolves and dogs and their relatives). The carnivores in turn are all members of a distinct group of “mammals”, which share all sorts of fundamental anatomical and behavioral similarities (hair instead of scales or feathers; mothers providing milk for their offspring; etc.) Mammals in turn are members of a larger group of tetrapods–the same sets of limb bones are used in one group to form wings, in another to form flippers, in another group to form legs for galloping or arms for swinging from tree branch to tree branch.
At first glance these groups might seem to be functional groupings–fish are animals designed to live in the sea; mammals are animals designed to live on land; birds are animals designed to live in the air. But there are mammals which spend much of their time in the sea (otters), mammals which can hardly get around on land at all (walruses and seals), and mammals which live out their entire lives in the sea, the whales–but whales are still mammals, still give birth to live young using a placenta, the same as the other placental mammals, still produce milk to feed their young, and still have lungs to breathe air rather than gills to breathe water, despite the obvious disadvantage of living your entire life in a medium which will kill you in an hour if you don’t get out of it. There are birds that live on land and never fly, even though their forelimbs are still now-useless “wings”. Other birds (penguins) are mainly aquatic animals like seals. Where some birds can’t fly, some mammals can.
Mammals or birds aren’t functional groups at all–birds aren’t “the animals that can fly”–they’re families: groups of animals with a common ancestor, which have inherited a certain basic body plan from great-great-great-…great-grandma, but which have adapted to all sorts of different ways of life. We also find many instances where a particular family dominates a geographic area; so outside Australia marsupials are rare, but in Australia marsupials dominate, and placental mammals are rare (or at least they were until humans showed up). It isn’t that placental mammals can’t live in Australia–the dingoes (brought by the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines) are perfectly happy there; there are thriving herds of sheep there; far too many rabbits for most Australians’ taste; and of course millions of humans. It’s just that before humans showed up, the placental mammals hadn’t made it to Australia. There were no placental mammals in Australia for the same reason there were no Buckners in America in the year 1500–the first Buckner hadn’t gotten off the boat yet.
Looking at the fossil record, we find sequences of now-extinct forms which represent the ancestors of the species which exist today. There are fossils of dinosaur-like things with teeth, and also wings and feathers. There are fossils of small herbivores, vaguely horse-like, but they don’t have hooves and they’re much smaller than any pony today. We also find fossils of things that aren’t as old as those fossils, of horse-like animals that are intermediate in size between the little horse-like things and modern horses and zebras, and which have started to lose their toes and their feet are becoming more like hooves. The fossil record also shows a very definite picture of change–there are no more dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers. On a long enough time scale, there is not only change but development–go back a few hundred million years and there are many large creatures living in the oceans and all over the land, although there are no mammals or birds (or even dinosaurs). Go back a few hundred million years before that and although many animals live in the sea there are no land animals. A few hundred million years before that, and there are no living things with hard skeletons; before that, no living things which aren’t single-celled organisms. In fact, for most of the history of life on Earth there were no multi-cellular organisms.
All living things share the same genetic “alphabet” (with only minor variations between humans and bacteria) and use the same limited subset of amino acids in making their proteins. The genetic code (or the protein sequences in their hemoglobins) of lions are more similar to those of tigers than either of them are to housecats; and housecats and lions are more similar to each other on the molecular level than they are to dogs or bears; and all mammals are more similar to each other than any of them are to birds. Of course humans are very close to chimpanzees, and less so to rhesus monkeys, and so on. Of course mice and fruit flies are much further apart on the molecular level than tiger and housecats or humans and chimpanzees, but they’re not entirely dissimilar–they’re certainly much closer to each other than either of them is to oak trees, or bacteria. There are very ancient master control genes which exist in very similar versions in mice and fruit flies, which can actually be transferred from mice to fruit flies and still function. Note that the basic groupings–cats, primates, mammals, vertebrates–had all been made on the basis of anatomy before the discovery of molecular biology (in fact, before the discovery of evolution). Molecular biology came along decades later and very largely confirmed what had already been deduced by looking at the shapes of animals, by studying their teeth and jawbones and ear bones. (Of course there were some surprises and some things that are still controversial. But there was nothing like finding that whales are more like fish than elephants at the level of their genes and proteins; even though whales overall look more like fish than they do elephants, and of course live more like fish than they do elephants, to no one’s surprise they’re much more like elephants on the inside.)
Living things are exquisitely well adapted to their environments, which would certainly be predicted by the hypothesis of a superintelligent designer. But they also show all sorts of evidence of jury-rigging, of things that used to do something else being reused to do something new, of being “kludgy” to use an old engineering and computer programming term. On the molecular level, there are long strings of genetic code that don’t seem to do anything–the DNA equivalent of asdfafasdfasdfasdfafafasdfasfasfasdfas. Pandas have a perfectly good set of normal tetrapod finger-bones; they don’t have primate-style thumbs. Opposable thumbs would be rather useful to pandas, for grasping bamboo. Rather than just provide pandas with proper thumbs, pandas have a workaround involving an enlarged wrist bone. Because of a rather stupid design flaw, all human eyes have a blind spot (where the optic nerve attaches to the retina). If the optic nerve simply attached to the other side of the retina, this blind spot wouldn’t occur–other animals don’t have such a blind spot; octopuses don’t, for example–but we’re stuck with it. We use a software workaround, so we’re usually unaware it’s even there. Our intakes for air and for water and food are very kludgy–we have two sets of openings, the nose and the mouth, but rather than dedicate one set of openings for breathing and the other for eating and drinking, they’re commingled, with the nose for breathing only but the mouth for air and food and water. We have a needlessly complex and not 100% reliable set of valves for closing off the air pipes when we’re eating and drinking. Thousands of people choke to death every year.
Living things frequently show a–to us–horrifyingly single-minded focus on reproduction at all costs in their anatomy and behavior, often resorting to methods of attaining that end that to humans seem bizarre, gruesome, even hideous. In a biology textbook you can find examples of suicide, murder, pre-natal mother-son incest, pre-natal cannibalistic fratricide, adultery and cuckoldry, gang rape, of sexual parasitism in which the males become mere appendages of the females, some rather infamous examples of post-mating cannibalism, gruesome parasitic egg-laying practices that inspired the Alien movies, all in the name of maximizing reproductive success.
There is no question that life has evolved, any more than there is any question that this planet goes around the Sun rather than the other way around. The modern neo-Darwinian synthesis–in which natural selection is the main engine of that evolution–is as well-established a theory as any theory in science. “Scientific” creationism and “intelligent design” aren’t even hypotheses–to the extent there were testable hypotheses which can be drawn from a literal reading of the Bible, they were disproved centuries ago.
I’ve just started his book and I’m impressed by his arguments, particularly as he enthusiastically recognises the existence and value of transcendent experience and his placing of it in the sphere of reason.
People can be smart and stupid at the same time - and believing in Creationism is about the biggest slice of Stupid you can cram into your face. Supposedly ‘smart’ people should be as ashamed to believe such complete and utter nonsense as they should be if they still believed in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
It is not okay to believe such errant nonsense as suicide bombing shows and it is not okay to foist this nonsense on kids.
We need less tolerance of religion not more, and I’m trying to do my bit.
Which explains a lot of events in human history, most of them regrettable. (Smart people with weird beliefs are potentially a lot more dangerous than stupid people with the same beliefs.)
Many thanks for putting time and respect into this response. This board is meant to be about fighting ignorance rather than fighting people, and your post is a good deal more likely to influence me than calling me stupid!
Good comparison. Looking back from here, it is embarrassing that for a looong time the institutional church rejected scientific evidence of the earth going round the sun. Poetic and incidental descriptions in the Bible of how we experience the sight of the sun were wrongly taken as fact about the mechanics. But don’t blame me; I wasn’t there.
The problems I have with evolution, as a complete account of our origins, include:
(1) The origin of complex organs. I have studied evolutionary accounts of the origin of the eye (thank you Google), and still find them far-fetched. As for the human knee joint, I have not come across an explanation of how this irreducible mechanical system could have evolved. Google “evolution human knee joint” and see what you find.
(2) Timescales. So far I am more persuaded by those arguing that there has not been sufficient time for beneficial mutations to have led to life as we know it.
(3) Transitions. Unless I am misinformed, the fossil record shows gradations between similar creatures along the lines of, say, 1 30 60 and 100, rather than all the numbers from 1 to 100. In other words, there are distinct species rather than a complete gradation. That doesn’t seem to me to support evolutionary origin. Where are all the incremental forms?
(4) Other aspects of our origin are so astounding that mere chance just isn’t enough for me. This planet has so much that is required for life – right size, right distance from sun, right size and sort of sun, belts that protect from radiation, right mix of elements, speed of rotation, tilt relative to orbit (giving seasons) – and every year we discover more about how amazing it is as a home for us. If this is taking me off topic, it’s because I’m responding to the whole viewpoint of origins that excludes God from the picture.
In addition, I am less inclined to believe in evolutionary origins because many evolutionists damage their own arguments:
(5) data that were once thought evidence for evolution are not retracted when disproved. In school I was taught that peppered moths were an example of evolution, two decades after this had been rejected. We still hear the claim that we share 98% of our genes with chimps; however, I heard last year that the most recent genome research puts this in the low 90s, and in fact we have a higher percentage of genes in common with mice! As our biochemistry is so similar to other mammals, and DNA is a lot to do with biochemistry, this does not trouble Creationists anyway.
Before anyone throws this one back, I accept in advance that (i) creationists probably do this as well, and (ii) it’s just part of the way the world works, in terms of dissemination of information and education. Countering outdated arguments that are still in publication is part of what the Straight Dope is here for.
(6) some evolutionists rule out whole dimensions of enquiry before they start. Logically, I accept John Mace’s challenge that once you rule out God, evolution (random chance guided by natural selection) is your best shot. However, that doesn’t mean it’s convincing.
Such a self-limited approach to investigation makes me think of centuries of mathematicians’ fruitless search a rational number for pi, not being prepared to believe in transcendental numbers!
In other words, some evolutionists believe in evolution come what may in terms of evidence, because they have to. I’m not limiting myself in that way.
That’s what atheists do! Religion may work that way for some people, particularly for those brought up in it. I wasn’t; I was persuaded by evidence and experience.
(7) some evolutionists have digested volumes of one-sided evidence on origins, but will not consider for five minutes the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, which I find a lot more persuasive. See e.g. www.theruebs.com. So, who has the closed mind?
Far fetched how? Which single step is unlikely, or is this more to do with (2)? What is so irreducible about the knee joint which doesn’t apply to the first bony fish?
A billion years, with trillions of mutations every day? Even if the odds of one or other mutation are one in 10 billion, it’s bound to happen statistically given such an enormous number of ‘dice rolls’ over such an enormous period.
Every form is ‘incremental’. Fossilisation requires very specific conditions and thus is actually quite rare (otherwise we’d be wading through them!). That’s why there are gaps (and, of course, once we’d filled any gap as in this walking fish case, the Creationist fallacy is to exclaim hey, there’s two new gaps!). In any case, speciation isn’t so gradual as you (or even Darwin) believe. A group isolated from its larger population can go through quite significant changes within a few hundred generations given the right environmental selective pressures. Even if you saw the very first isolated individual which could no longer breed with the original large population (and is therefore a new species) you might think it’s quite different indeed to the originals, and wonder where the missing links are for it. Of course, the missing links are its parents, grandparents … great[sup]200[/supgrandparents etc.
Right, but that’s not evolution. And in any case, there are enough planets in the universe that, again, plenty of them will have those characteristics.
What? Evolution is biological change over time. If some environmental factor (eg. sooty trees) changes the moth demographic, that is what evolution is.
Cite? Humans do share 98% of genes with chimps, and chimps and humans share a lower proportion with mice.
You are more convinced by a God of the Gaps? OK, that’s fine. But, given the vast age of Earth and the fossil record, you’d still have to have God creating new species continually over billions of years, and even causing the new species which have been observed.
Science deals with the natural, not the supernatural. I can find no evidence for Jesus’ resurrection beyond a book, written decades after he was ever supposed to have lived at all, saying so. If evidence like that was good enough, I’d believe all kinds of stuff. Our minds shouldn’t be so open that our brains fall out.
I never understood this argument. It seems obvious that since we evolved on this planet, it will of course be the perfect environment for us. It’s akin to be amazed that salted water is so perfect for sea fishes or stating that the reason snow is white and cold is that polar bears have a thick white fur.
Some living organism are thriving in an environement with a very high temperature, or completely lacking oxygen, etc… So, on another planet, you would equally amazed that your planet has an equally perfect temperature of 100° C , fortunately totally lacks oxygen in its athmosphere, etc…
Also, even assuming that there’s only one possible set of condition allowing for life, given the giganormous number of celestial bodies in the universe, the fact that on planet would present all the right condition isn’t surprising.
For your argument to make sense, you’d have to assume that :
Life can only appear in extremely specific conditions
That these conditions are so incredibly unlikely that they couldn’t possibly be met on any planet in the whole universe.
Google “knee injuries” and see what you find. Yes, human knees–like many other body parts–are amazing, but they’re at times painfully jury-rigged and kludgy, as you would expect from a joint which has evolved from being part of a tetrapod to being part of a biped in the comparativey short span of a few million years.
This is really just an “argument from personal incredulity”. Just how long would be sufficient time for “beneficial mutations to have led to life as we know it”, and what basis do you have for specifying that number?
There are in fact many recorded transitions. The vast majority of things which live and die aren’t fossilized; it takes special circumstances to produce fossils. Most things which die are eaten (by everything from large predators and scavengers to insects to microscopic bacteria) and no trace of them is left. Nonetheless, we can still extrapolate from this to this. Will we get some of the details wrong? Of course (and no one would claim we have all the details of the history of life on Earth correct), but we can be entirely confident it didn’t start out looking like this.
There are traditionally held to be nine planets in the Solar System–maybe we’re up to 10 now–and several planet-sized moons. There are at least several dozen objects large enough to be fairly called “worlds” (planets, moons, large asteroids or minor planets). We’ve discovered over 180 planets orbiting other stars. This is the only world we know of, so far anyway, which supports life. But there is now no real doubt that the Universe contains countless planets. By very conservative extrapolations of what we’ve found so far there must be many billions of planets in this galaxy alone, which in turn is one galaxy out of tens of billions. However improbable the particular characteristics of Earth may be, when you deal out a few quintillion hands of cards, someone’s bound to get a royal flush sooner or later. (I also think you may be overestimating Earth’s rarity in a few instances; the “mix of elements” found on this planet aren’t that terribly unusual–carbon, oxygen, hydrogen–even water–iron, and so on are found in many places throughout the Universe, near and far. In other cases, it’s not clear how necessary some of the characteristics you list are to making Earth habitable; for example, Earth’s speed of rotation–the length of its day–has changed considerably during the hundreds of millions of years life has existed on this planet.)
To marvel that this planet is uniquely suited to the life which has evolved on it is rather like being astonished that a puddle exactly fits the hole in the ground which contains it!
The famous peppered moth story is a bit more complicated than simply saying that the story has been flatly rejected as evidence of evolution (as opposed to, say, Piltdown man, which everyone agrees was a hoax).
As for the claim that we have a higher percentage of genes in common with mice than with chimpanzees, I would really have to see a cite for that. It would be a pretty earth-shaking claim, the sort of thing that would be front page news on the New York Times–like discovering that we’ve gotten Mars and Venus mixed up all these years, and Mars is really the second planet from the Sun, while Venus is the fourth.
A literal reading of the Bible would (as one example) predict that the entire Earth’s surface was covered in a universal flood within historical or near-historical times. There is no evidence of this, and in fact lots and lots of evidence against it. Similarly, the “young Earth” of Biblical literalism was disproved before the rise of evolutionary biology; in fact, the growing realization of Earth’s extreme age was one of the discoveries which sparked speculations and hypotheses and eventually theories about evolution.
Essentially, creationists create two ad hoc categories: “microevolution” (lines of descent too well established to dispute, even using their entire obfuscatory arsenal) and “macroevolution” (everything else). Individual cases (e.g. Eohippus -> Equus) are moved from the latter to the former when the accumulation of evidence becomes overwhelming.
Hi, you have understood my argument rather well, and answered it well too.
I like reading science fiction, and it is fun to envisage life emerging on planets without liquid water, bombarded by intense radiation, etc. Whether it is realistic is another matter. I suppose that I do indeed make the assumptions you have set out.
With my feet back on the ground, I also enjoy a sense of wonder at the world we live in. Do you have this too, or just think “well, I suppose it would be like this anyway”?
Not that this is conclusive as to our origins. Thanks for your reply.
The assumption that life can appear only in certain specific conditions–liquid water, the presence of certain chemicals and the absence of others–is a pretty standard assumption. We may all be wrong, but it’s an assumption just about everyone makes. The assumption that these conditions are incredibly unlikely is something that no one knows–we have detailed information on only the one system of planets, and of course it has one planet perfectly suited for life. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of finding other solar systems; we just don’t know how common (for example) liquid water is. There may even be several other places right here in our own Solar System where there is liquid water.
Also, more and more we’ve come to realize that even “life as we know it” exists in an astonishing range of environments, from geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean to super-salty or super-acidic environments to the deepest recesses of Antarctica.
I think the Universe discovered by science–incomprehensibly vast and ancient, terrifyingly violent, where tigers and whales and butterflies and oak trees are literally our relatives, in exactly the same way that the great-great-grandson of your great-great-grandfather’s brother is your relative, where the little points of light we see in the sky at night are other worlds and other suns, where the oxygen we breathe and the iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones was forged in giant dying stars that exploded so forcefully that they outshone entire galaxies, and where we puny humans can nevertheless probe outwards across billions of light years and backwards to the dawn of time to begin to understand all this: that to me is much more wondrous than the world of Bronze Age nomads, however inventive and intelligent they may have been.
Well, working from the seven stages on this site: “Complex organs such as eyes can evolve gradually”, stages B, F and G. The writer states that the skin can detect infra-red radiation, but I think the skin is just detecting temperature, i.e. the effect of infra-red, not the radiation itself. But I think we should start a new thread if we’re going to discuss this, especially as neither of us is likely to convince the other.
Good question. How do evolutionists suggest that the human knee joint , with its 16 precision fixings, could have evolved? And how do evolutionists suggest that the first bony fish could have evolved?
In retrospect I wish I had made a note of the source when I heard it. I have had a quick look on the web and have not found back up for the results I mentioned. You can read 96% with chimps here (Nat. Geographic, August 2005) and 99% with mice here (Evolution pages, mouse genome) but these are not measuring the same thing. Now I’m inclined to think the scientist I heard was talking outside his field of expertise. Sorry.
No, I’m more convinced by the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and therefore vindicated all the astonishing claims that he made for himself.
OK, you could start with the introductory site I suggested earlier. There are plenty more. Sceptics e.g. lawyers and journalists have set themselves to examine the evidence to refute it once and for all, and ended up writing books explaining how they were persuaded that it is true.
I have a feeling that no amount of exposure to scientific sources is going to change your mind about evolution, so I’m going to suggest you approach this from another angle. Do you have a member of the clergy that you can talk about this subject? If so, you might ask him or her how your religion should inform you on this subject. Perhaps he or she may even be one of the 10,000 members of the Clergy who have signed The Clergy Letter Project.
