Evolution question.

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Quahom1

His makes perfect sense, as his comes from documented material. Yours does not, since dinosaurs could not provide proof or even circumstantial evidence.

If you mean by that I am writing in my own words and not just googling my way through creationist cesspit's then you are right! and I have no idea what you are talking about regarding dinosaurs.

We can't find one damn solid structure that gives accurate age or links to what you profess, yet we know there was someone, named Jesus, that rocked the world...

you mean the leader of that little Jewish cult who had his story hijacked and perverted beyond recognition by the emperor Constantine? Sorry but there is no proof he ever really existed, though my guess is that he did. But so what. Lets face it we do not have a single documented word from his mouth. just the recollections of a band of people who had cousins or distant aunties that might have met him. Jim Morrison has a lot more material that we can be certain is his, and he did rock the world

Pretty lame to try and tie god in with evolution...apples and oranges. right?

No. what is lame is to try and ignore or deny the fact of evolution in favour of some ancient superstition.

Please explain 24 vs 23 Chromosone pairs between all other primates, and "man"...I wait with bated breath. (sorry I double everything when it is pairs).

lol, I find it so amusing when you try to say something smart but the question itself shows you have such a limited understanding of what you are trying to say.


tao

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

You know there is a fundamental difference between getting your knowledge from some dusty old tome written by the power mongers and despots of history and reading a science journal. Scientific knowledge evolves!! One piece of research leads to another and over time the original question has a body of independent and peer reviewed work from which a conclusion can emerge. The past 40 years has undergone a truly huge leap of insight into genetics. It would be very suspicious if our ideas on evolutionary dating had not changed in that time. So what is your point?

There's also a difference between reading and forging ahead with the presumption that I pulled my research from "creationist cesspits" and "dusty old tomes written by the power mongers and despots of history." But then, you are not the first to leap to that erroneous conclusion.

Look again, I pulled from science journals and science oriented sites, as I almost always do, aside from wiki. Horse's mouth, one might say. At least I'm not pulling manure out of the other end of the horse...and the references are there for all to see. Where's yours?

Ad hominem is not logic. Double standards is not logic. Moving goalposts is not logic. Seems to me that if these are the standards of a person, that person has little place to cast judgment on more stable methods of inquiry into the mysteries of life.

Such shifting "truth" must demand a whole lot of faith in order to believe, 'cause Lord knows its gonna change again tomorrow. I'm sure glad reality isn't like that...it's nice to know the sea is green, the sky is blue, and the mountains are purple...they were yesterday, and they will be again tomorrow. THAT is truth, and THAT is fact.

[Dogbrain]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

you mean the leader of that little Jewish cult who had his story hijacked and perverted beyond recognition by the emperor Constantine?

You actually buy the "Constantine made it all up" rubbish? You're intellectually identical to the hardcore creationists.

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

There's also a difference between reading and forging ahead with the presumption that I pulled my research from "creationist cesspits" and "dusty old tomes written by the power mongers and despots of history." But then, you are not the first to leap to that erroneous conclusion.

.

I think you should assume that when I reply to Q I am talking to him and not you.

tao

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Dogbrain

You actually buy the "Constantine made it all up" rubbish? You're intellectually identical to the hardcore creationists.

No. I do not believe that Constantine 'made it all up'. What I do believe is that as an expert politician he saw it as a great political expediency to create a monotheistic church which he could control. As his mother was a Christian he knew it well and used that one.



tao

[bananabrain]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

You almost persuade me to drop my wholesale rejection of religion with the balance and pragmatism you bring to this debate. Almost, but not quite. Perhaps in due course I will but currently it suits my perspective in my thinking to go at it from this angle.

*gasp* - that is probably the nicest thing you've ever said to me. i'm more than happy with where this gets us; i'm not aiming to get you to "drop your wholesale rejection of religion", though - only to get you to a point where you can allow that religion does not *necessarily* require intellectual dishonesty and in particular both the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of science. i have already, i hope, made it clear that it is up to us believers to challenge our own ways of thinking; the unexamined PoV cannot be mollycoddled - what sort of belief system can't stand a poke or two?

Rather I would like to see children spared any pressure or compulsion to believe. Why not let them come to it themselves by their observation of their parents love, compassion and caring. By seeing in their parents something worth pursuing for themselves. Why fill a child's mind with concepts it cannot understand? Let them enjoy their childhood, there is plenty time for philosophy later.

are you familiar with the passover seder story of the four sons? each asks a question commensurate with his knowledge and each requires an appropriate answer. there is one who is knowledgeable and asks within the context, one who challenges as a sceptic, one who asks naive or information-gathering questions and one who doesn't even understand what questions are. my older child is 2; it is inconceivable that i could pressure him to "believe". he doesn't even know that we're jewish, or what that is. what he does know is that on friday night we sit down as a family and make kiddush and he's allowed to stay up for it and drink a little bit of sweet grape juice, that we light candles and have people over, that he gets a blessing from me (not that he understands what that is yet) and that it is *special*. he understands we don't listen to music or watch TV or go in the car. eventually he will begin to ask why that is and eventually he will have to make the decision whether to carry that behaviour on as an adult. i can influence him, but i will not (unlike some) prevent him getting influenced from other sources; this is because i have confidence that the way we do things has much to recommend it. as far as science is concerned, he has already started to understand that some animals, like alligators, he can see in real life and others, like dinosaurs and dragons, he can only see on TV; he can't quite articulate yet why this is, but eventually he will understand that dragons aren't real and that we're out of dinosaurs these days and this will come about through questioning. this, to my way of thinking, sounds very much like what you're suggesting. hopefully i'm not stunting the little bloke's critical faculties.

Originally Posted by wil

Genesis was a creation story for 2000 years ago, does anyone really expect that they should have understood evolution at that time?

well, it does clearly posit a gradualist world view, even if it's not an evolutionary one, at least in the apparent plain sense of the words, even if it is an implicit possibility once you understand how the text works. we have a principle that "the Torah speaks in human language"; this means it must speak in such a way as to cater for any stage of human development; it is part of the Divine genius of the text that it can be shown to do so. in my opinion, that is.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

That is how I came to my belief system. I was given total freedom and near-zero indoctrination.

hah, i arrived at mine through a process of critical evaluation and empirical evidence, as far as i'm concerned, but that's an individual path, not one i could reliably transfer to someone else.

I agree that the time has come in the information and global age for people to be socialized into diversity rather than a single viewpoint.

hmmm. be careful with this; at some point it begs the question "so what am *i*, then?" and one needs to be able to answer that effectively; "i am an interfaith citizen of the world" is unlikely to be a satisfactory answer, by the same logic that one may speak many languages, but one must have at least one particular mother tongue to rely on as a first port of call. if identity is a matter of different hats, we cannot do with no hat at all.

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

It's interesting how religious denominations that push young earth creationism can operate state accredited universities. For example, the SDA's, whose dogma includes literal seven day creationism, operate Loma Linda University and hospital, one of the preeminent medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country.

i can see how that might happen, but i wonder how they cope with the logical disconnect between the experimental and research methods that are required for medicine and those required for archaeology, not to mention genetics. surely at some point they have to concede that if you can rely on the results of one, you can rely on the results of the other.

Originally Posted by juantoo3

WTF? Where...EVER???...on this site have I denounced evolution??? What I have done consistently is challenge the gross dogmatic assumptions and perverted logic of evolutionists.

you seemed to me to be objecting to evolution on the grounds that it might lead to eugenics; i would consider that "whataboutery" on the same level as criticising religion because it might lead to genocide.

Originally Posted by Quahom1

We can't find one damn solid structure that gives accurate age or links to what you profess, yet we know there was someone, named Jesus, that rocked the world...

to be precise, q, we know that people believe he existed, but we don't know for sure, because of the different agenda involved. accuracy in both is a matter of degree. you might trust tacitus, or the chroniclers of various cultures, or scientific agenda, or you might not. it's not always a matter of *faith*, but it *is* a matter of trust and trust, as we know, must be earned.

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

Scientific knowledge evolves!! One piece of research leads to another and over time the original question has a body of independent and peer reviewed work from which a conclusion can emerge.

precisely. the fact that a theory changes its calibration does not invalidate its parameters. as someone said once, "when the facts change, i revise my opinion. what do you do?" i was recently at an event talking about the documentary hypothesis; the current academic state of the art is, unsurprisingly, a huge argument about which dates x or y happened, but none of them are questioning whether it's a human document or not, that's ruled out a priori. the fact that some of the dates held by at least one of the schools agree with the traditional dating seems not to disturb them either! however, it did give me some comfort that my test of intellectual honesty is still reliable enough to sustain my faith in Revelation and Torah mi-Sinai.

b'shalom

bananabrain

[wil]

Namaste Q,

It is a short drive down to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Right between the White House and the Capitol down there on the mall.

You can read all the charts, the family tree, from the shrew forward. This is your national museum, your tax dollars at work, right there to explain it all for you, tis what you've been defending the shores for.

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Such shifting "truth" must demand a whole lot of faith in order to believe, 'cause Lord knows its gonna change again tomorrow. I'm sure glad reality isn't like that...it's nice to know the sea is green, the sky is blue, and the mountains are purple...they were yesterday, and they will be again tomorrow. THAT is truth, and THAT is fact.

First, the issue of how old the human split is has changed due to improvements in genetic science (including the technology to study genetics).

Evolutionary theory is not shifting truth. It is theory- it is a good, useful, working model to explain something. Theories necessarily change over time when we obtain new technology, methodology, data, or even when humans are born that have a unique ability to see the old data in new ways. It's part and parcel of science.

The general public seems to think science is about facts. Science is not about facts. Science is about making facts into useful information. It is about inquiry. If we stayed at the "facts," much would never be accomplished. Indeed, we find usefulness in our theories and hypotheses long before we fully understand the processes behind what we're doing. As a key example relevant to evolution, we have long been fighting bacterial diseases based on the theory that strains evolve over time and we have to change our medicines and treatments to have optimal healing. All this information about how humans should eat lean meat and whole grains and lots of fruit and veggies-- that's based in evolutionary theory too. And long before humans even knew that DNA coded for life and all that info, we were already harnessing evolution to our advantage through our observations and hunches-- in animal and plant domestication and breeding. Our grains, corn for example, are due to humans harnessing mutation in a population and cultivating the mutations that benefit us.

Science is not about the facts- that corn once was a grass that was useless for eating, and then we saw a cob, and now we eat corn. Science is about the process- that even those in ancient times who noticed that mutation, had an idea about the processes at work and harnessed it for human benefit.

That one would throw out scientific theory because it changes as we gain more information- for example, to throw out evolutionary theory because researchers have not yet figured out the exact percentage that we're like chimps... this is like throwing out one's religion because everyone has a different idea about what it means. In fact, the latter is far more divergent amongst "experts" than the former. It's like the people who reject Christ because Christians can't figure out one unified view of Him and God, and we don't know exactly where all the text from the Bible came from, or when it was written, or what got left out and why.

Both are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There are very few facts in life. Most depends on perspective. Even the color of sky could change if one is color blind, or entirely blind from birth. But more importantly, these facts don't do anything for us. We have to categorize, analyze, look for predictive models and processes to make any of it useful.

So far as I can see it, reality changes every day- because we can't know reality. Reality used to be a flat earth and the sun going 'round us. Reality used to be thinking flies spontaneously generated from meat. We used to not know there were cells, much less atoms and subatomic particles. We're bound by all sorts of limitations. Some of these fade away as we have new technology, new ideas. But we can come up with good, working models.

[Quahom1]

Originally Posted by wil

Namaste Q,

It is a short drive down to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Right between the White House and the Capitol down there on the mall.

You can read all the charts, the family tree, from the shrew forward. This is your national museum, your tax dollars at work, right there to explain it all for you, tis what you've been defending the shores for.

Just because a curator puts something some scientists drew up, on the wall, doesn't mean it is accurate or absolute.

[Operacast]

Both Tao and Banana have been having an eminently worthwhile exchange here. Thank you.

I wanted to add something to what Banana says here:

Originally Posted by bananabrain

hah, i arrived at mine through a process of critical evaluation and empirical evidence, as far as i'm concerned, but that's an individual path, not one i could reliably transfer to someone else.

This is precisely how I arrived at the point where I'm now a believer, after having been a skeptic most of my life (my parents were agnostics). I don't know of anyone else who's followed the same evaluation trail I underwent, though, so -- yes -- I am interested in knowing more details of Banana's path. (Too inquisitive of me?) Sometimes I admit I've been under the delusion(?) that I might at least reliably make a skeptic _understand_ the logic of my own rationale/path to eventually crediting the concept of belief after all ("your brain just went soft" I can hear Tao saying;-), if not _accept_ it. So perhaps the notion of "reliably transfer" is still an overreach, as Banana implies.

My own story is an involved one, although I'd never have arrived at belief without an abiding and lifelong conviction that evolution is now a proven fact, so I guess it's not that off-topic in this thread. (To ward off any confusion, yes, it was my abiding conviction that evolution has gotten the big picture essentially correct that actually helped me arrive at belief.) The sheer length of my story is what might derail this thread anyway (hard to say). So in the mean time, if Banana's story is not that involved, I would like to know it.

Thanks,

Operacast

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

I think you should assume that when I reply to Q I am talking to him and not you.

tao

Very well, then I might ask that when I reply to Path you should assume I am talking to her, not you. What is more, look again...perhaps "creationist cesspits" was a response to Q but it directly referenced me, the other was a direct response to me that effectively meant the same thing.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Evolutionary theory is not shifting truth. It is theory- it is a good, useful, working model to explain something. Theories necessarily change over time when we obtain new technology, methodology, data, or even when humans are born that have a unique ability to see the old data in new ways. It's part and parcel of science.

Exactly, I'm not the one that needs to be convinced.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

The general public seems to think science is about facts. Science is not about facts. Science is about making facts into useful information. It is about inquiry.

Are the hard heads among us listening?

Originally Posted by path_of_one

That one would throw out scientific theory because it changes as we gain more information- for example, to throw out evolutionary theory because researchers have not yet figured out the exact percentage that we're like chimps... this is like throwing out one's religion because everyone has a different idea about what it means. In fact, the latter is far more divergent amongst "experts" than the former. It's like the people who reject Christ because Christians can't figure out one unified view of Him and God, and we don't know exactly where all the text from the Bible came from, or when it was written, or what got left out and why.

Gee, does this sound like anybody we know?

I have no problem with understanding science is a tool for learning. But there are those among us who make a religion out of science, call it fact, and try to beat G-d out of the rest of us with it. You hit the nail on the head, and they are every bit as hysterically religious as those they rail against.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Operacast

I'd never have arrived at belief without an abiding and lifelong conviction that evolution is now a proven fact, so I guess it's not that off-topic in this thread. (To ward off any confusion, yes, it was my abiding conviction that evolution has gotten the big picture essentially correct that actually helped me arrive at belief.)

It's good to see you around again Operacast, it's been quite a while.

I hope you don't mind, but your wonderful comment invites a response.

Like BB said quoting Dawkins, all life is connected.

So we share genes with chimps...we also share genes with Charles Manson, the common house mouse, the american cockroach, bananas and yeast. All flora and fauna share genetic material...to me that is such an overwhelming realization.

What science gives us is the tools to try to make some sense of it, but science can't tell us how it started. Oh, there is a lot of speculation...but speculation is just that, not truth, not fact. Perhaps there is a conscious creator behind it all in the beginning...or perhaps it is a random chance occurance. Science is in no position to say, and those honestly in the service of science would say as much.

Out of some tiny spark of life grew the complex variety we all see around us. We cannot truthfully say when, but we can make an educated guess. We cannot truthfully say what mechanism drives the process, but we can make an educated guess.

I am actually in awe of the process, and it makes me consider far more deeply than the trite myths I learned in Sunday school, or public school.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by bananabrain

you seemed to me to be objecting to evolution on the grounds that it might lead to eugenics; i would consider that "whataboutery" on the same level as criticising religion because it might lead to genocide.

My objection was to defining speciation by cosmetics...you know, color of the skin, size of the nose, amount of intelligence kind of thing? Which *is* one of the primary uses of the term "species," and it was this specifically that led to eugenics and german atrocities during wwII. I am not pulling this out of my arse...there is plenty of historic reference to support my comment.

Yet we still commonly find those that tout the "evidence of speciation" by the size of the beak on a finch. If that's the case, then there are a whole bunch of different human species...and all that entails. Oooops.

[Tao_Equus]

Hi opera,
I for one would like to hear your story.

Originally Posted by Operacast

("your brain just went soft" I can hear Tao saying;-)

No buddy I can see how easy it is to adopt 'faith' in something bigger. And I am fully aware that such adoption need not be negative or counter to honesty at the very deepest level. To believe or not to believe is a personal choice and one I do, despite my chosen stance here as resident non-believer, respect everyone's choice to believe what they wish. And I believe I usually keep my outspoken condemnations of religion not to an individuals beliefs but to the institutions and their tools.

CR is my favourite discussion site. It is always here I pop in first and keep coming back. I do not think you can do that without on some level having a deep personal commitment to the question of religion. I think most of the regulars here that I debate with are not here to proselytise nor to confirm their beliefs to themselves but to be inspired to think outside the box. I do not want to proselytize my own mediocre philosophy but I do want to see how it stands up in the face of others ideas about the nature of reality. And of course their expertise in general. I do not want to convert or sway, I only want to discuss. And I like passion. I think people write their best stuff when they are animated to passion. And sometimes their worst, which can be equally enlightening as many of my own post amply illustrate. But at the end of the day if you come and post here you have a duty to listen to every voice. You can then of course dismiss it for yourself, but you should listen. I think I do.

Faith is so deeply personal that it can only be described by metaphor, in that it is like love. I do not think you soft for finding it embedded in the same things I look at. But it suits my purpose and method to reject it not so much as untrue but as irrelevant. Again I hope you take the time to tell your story.



tao