SCIENCE!

[elanid]

I'm supposed to be doing my homework, but I'd rather not (c'mon, you guys, I have a Chinese midterm, give me a break :P), so instead, I'm going to write about evolution.  One of my classes this year is an upper-division biology class, Experimental Ecology & Evolution (E3, for short, and I love it more than any class ever), which is giving me uppity

Comments

[glaikery]

Oh, glad you did! (Psh, Chinese midterms. ;) ps plz to do my Chinese hw!)

Yes, quite - and the reason I get frustrated at the "science classes for HU majors" and &c &c - because of course, this is what I want; there is no need for "actually applying this stuff to ___" and discussions about whether... gshgksl, yeah. (I mean, I have it now, albeit in a class I could probably and do sometimes ace with my eyes closed, but it's what'll let me take the interesting things. And we do get to look at nifty shiz, right

[elanid]

Dude, I love you, you have such a ridiculous way of talking when you get excited. :P (That is a <3ful comment, not a...is there a cute little symbol for hate?

[spacepixie21]

ooh! can i sit on the opposite side of the fence?! i'm not insulted by evolution, but i will be one of the first to say i believe it's totally bogus. i think the only thing i get insulted about is that we as human beings would want to say we "evolved" from monkeys. and i can't begin to believe something like that without any real proof. if we've been evolving all this time, shouldn't there be in-betweens somewhere? anywhere?

i am a proponent for creationism and intelligent design, i'll say that right now. but all through school, i studied creationism vs. evolution, and the more we went into it, the more discrepancies i saw in the evolutionary theory. i think it takes a lot more faith to believe all of life evolved out of one little cell or whatever millions and billions of years ago than it takes to believe that God designed it all. :)

[elanid]

Okay, let me take this sequentially. ^^ First of all, evolution doesn't say anything about humans having evolved from monkeys - it suggests that, given the evidence, we share a common ancestor. The in-betweens you want are all extinct - because first of all, the source isn't 'monkeys' it's 'common ancestor.' And second of all, the intermediaries have all been out-competed by their descendents - namely, us and monkeys. This site is a pretty decent brief overview of the hominid fossil record, although if you want more in-depth commentary, I'd be happy to dig some up for you.

As far as intelligent design and creationism goes...well, you can believe in creationism all you want, but there isn't one single shred of scientific evidence to back it up - which, according to any definition of theory, isn't. The claim that life evolved out of one single cell, on the other hand, has copious amounts of evidence to support it - which doesn't mean that it's true, simply that, given objective reality, it's vastly more probable than anything

[diatryma]

I am not quite up to looking for them, but we have excellent records of some missing links. Fossils are a really bad way to record things-- it's rare that fossils form to begin with, and they are biased to certain conditions like oceans rather than tropical canopy-- but they're there

[brugenmeister]

Response, Part 1

[brugenmeister]

Part 2

[sarahbrand]

You're accusing me of making assumptions, but I think you have to make assumptions to get anything done. (More on this in a bit.) If I reject Occam's Razor, for example, it gives me license to completely make stuff up, which is not generally conducive to reasoning out anything that is correct or true.

I actually do hold to determinism, now that you bring it up. Free will is basically an illusion resulting from lack of perfect knowledge. (Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen is the best illustration I can think of for this.) And I'm okay with that.

And what does science do? It maps causes and their effects or vice versa -- through either inductive or deductive reasoning. It can never reach the full picture, because the number is infinite, right? Yet it assumes -- ASSUMES -- there are causes and effects that it can map.

Right. That's the reason that introductory physics problems tell you to assume five million things so that you can actually solve for x. But once you've made those assumptions, you can solve for x. And, if the effect of the

[brugenmeister]

Response Part 1

[brugenmeister]

Response part 2

[brugenmeister]

Part 3