We do, and there’s also no real problem with “Darwinian evolution”. The problem comes in, linguistically, when it’s cast as “Darwinism”.
Noted.
Forgiven? :smack:
It’s possible, I suppose, but I’ve read the thing he’s talking about (IIRC, it was in The Dilbert Future), and the gist of his argument was, “humans have been wrong about big things before, therefore there are big things we’re wrong about now”. Which is justifiable on the surface, but nonsense when you apply it to the literal mountains of evidence we have for evolution.
Something I’ve seen crop up again and again in Adams’ controversial writings is that he can’t quite conceive of someone smarter than himself, or at least he has a deep-seeded insecurity about not being as smart as he thinks he is, so anything that sound complicated must be bullshit.
Nevar!
haters gonna hate
I worked for a guy that doubted evolution, but not from religious motivation. Many of his arguments were the same - based on irreducible complexity, but he was arguing that the whole thing was, and would remain an obscure mystery to us - I guess this is a bit like hard agnosticism, but he explicitly stated that he didn’t think anyone in any camp - religious or scientific - was right.
Wow, this can’t be any more timely, PZ Myers has some interesting information about Mr Adams.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/why_sockpuppetry_is_stupid.php
The claim was:
So what if what the gist of his argument was what you said it is? IME, folks that don’t except evolution because of religious underpinnings and attempt to give reasons why, don’t start and end with “because God did it.” They sometimes say crap like this:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/fossils_are_bul.html
That along with what he bothered posting online in the links I provided in post #55 lead me to believe Adams’ God belief has a little something to do with his non-acceptance of evolution.
As God is my witness I was unaware of this article or the issue it discusses. My criticism of Adams was based on his previous work. Yikes. Adams looking bad here.
Actually I came to the conclusion Adams isn’t very smart when in The Dilbert Future he presented, as a thought experiment, the idea that gravity could be caused by all matter in the universe doubling in size (by which he meant physical volume) every second. According to Adams, there’s no way to distinguish between this phenomenon and gravity. He claimed that he’d gotten feedback from lots of people and there was no hole in his theory. No hole at all. Unprovable, he admitted, but completely unfalsifiable as well. Yup. No chance at all of any sort of little error like oh I don’t know GRAVITY ISN"T PROPORTIONAL TO SIZE, IT’S PROPORTIONAL TO MASS!!!
I had to read it about fifty times to be sure he was writing what I thought he was writing, and that he was serious.
It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea of big lizards walking the earth millions of years ago. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what went on five thousand years ago. I think failure to “get” evolution is a testament to comprehension of paradoxical ideas rather than religious dogma.
:giggle: If something doubles in size - er, volume - can’t its mass increase? Maybe he had right idea, wrong terminology? I never took HS physics, just chem. And I cheated. Unfortunately, whatever I learned about physics was either in LOST or having conversations about aliens and time travel with scientist boyfriends. 
I’m woefully undereducated in this department.
I had no idea before this thread that Adams was anything other than the creator of a crappy comic strip. :eek:
can’t you write the word “God”?
Eh, google “Jews G-D write”, or something.
Should be lots of answers for you.
See posts 7, 10, 14, 22 and so on. What “paradoxical ideas”?
Certainly, I’ve seen that sort of reaction (as well as more canny rejection earlier in the conversation, if the listener happens to have been in similar discussions before), but another thing that seems to happen a lot is the sheer difficulty of getting a creationist to join any concept to any other concept.
So you might have a focused discussion about how we can deduce the branching of the tree of common descent by tracking shared mutations and endogenous retroviral insertions - and might actually end up getting agreement that this does demonstrate relatedness, only to get to that point and have them say “yeah, but so what? Where are the fossils?” - so you have a lengthy discussion on some particular lines of descent that are well-represented in the fossil record, only to get to the end of that one, and they say “Yeah, but there’s no way to prove what’s ancestrally related to what!” - because they’ve lost the thread of the previous topic.
I refuse to attribute this to plain stupidity, because I know that the same people are capable of chaining all sorts of data together in their theological explorations, but neither do I think they’re being particularly obtuse - it’s just that it takes effort to resolve, which is hard to commit from a position that doesn’t appreciate the end goal as desirable.
Well Dinosaurs weren’t lizards anymore then birds are lizards. They were reptiles, but so are birds. Dinos were their own thing. The truly amazing thing is they’re still around, not as lizard like things, but as birds. Birds are a dinosaur type, and dinos are reptiles.
That’s a simple string of facts that makes a walk outside magical. There’s dinos in the pet store, in the trees, hopping on the ground, eating road kill. Chicken nuggets are made of dinosaur! I fed dinosaurs bread in the park! I save a dinosaur from my cat! They were still alive all this time. I thought they were just birds.
Another interesting thing is the biggest vertebrate wasn’t a dinosaur at all, but a Blue Whale. We have giant things and dinos right now!
Another thing that helps make it more intuitive is the numbers. In humans there’s about 23,000 genes that have functions that do things. These genes have a mutation rate of about 0.00000001 per gene. 0.00000001 * 23 000 = 0.00023.
So for every 23,000 humans one of them has a mutation on a gene that does something, resulting in telekinesis, super healing factor, magnetic control, controlling the weather, or laser vision.
The difference between a human and a chimp in important dna is about 2,000 genes IIRC. 2,000 tweaks and you make the dramatic leap from a bonobo to Charlie Sheen.
I could have picked better examples but you get the idea.
Most of those aren’t any good. But when you consider how many hundreds and millions, even billions of human ancestors, and their kin, it makes a lot of sense.
Human embryos have tails. How do creationists explain that?
I know a geologist who, as part of his job, has used the fossil record to pinpoint the location of natural gas deposits. How do creationists explain that?
[ul]
[li]Satan put the fossils there to deceive us.[/li]
[li]God put the fossils there to test our faith.[/li]
[li]Natural gas must have been created during the Flood, which is what laid down all those fossils.[/li]
[li]Your geologist friend is lying, all evidence for evolution is faked.[/li][/ul]
Generally speaking, they don’t. Creationists and petrochemical geologists are pretty much non-intersecting sets. You can’t really be successful in both domains simultaneously.
At first glance, it sometimes seems like the creationist camp has a fair population of members with a scientific bent, but on closer examination, they tend to be engineers, mathematicians, dermatologists, etc - professionals whose career path has limited their involvement in/experience of paleontology, genetics, population dynamics, etc.
When I was a kid, I–like a lot of other kids–was really into dinosaurs. This led to me reading a lot of library books on paleontology and geology and so on. You learn, for example, that there was a time when amphibians ruled the earth. Well, when you look at a tadpole, it’s easy to see how fish led to amphibians, and when you compare a salamander to a lizard, it’s easy to see how amphibians led to reptiles and so on.
And so even though my eyes tend to glaze over when we start talking about frequency of allels, armed with a basic understanding of the course of natural history–microorganisms-worms-fish-amphibians-reptiles-mammals-monkeys-cave men–it becomes easy to see evolution as an underlying thread. If you know what happened, it becomes easier to grasp explanations as to how it happened.
So perhaps imposing all the technical details of evolution on students before they have a grasp of the basic story of natural history can result in a lot of them not understanding it.
And then of course there’s all the religious bias.