As fascinating as this post is, I have to say my main reaction was "Ooh! Watership Down! Bunnies! So many bunnies!" ...and I just kinda sat there and kept doing that. Watership Down can distract me from just about anything. :)
I think the problem is, people seem to have this idea that one day there was an ape and the next day there was a human, and well, just, NO. They don't seem to grasp the concept that this happened, like you illustrated, over thousands and thousands of years. It didn't just happen in one day. It took hundreds and hundreds of genetic mutations before we got where we are today. As for the evolution of life itself, well -- again, like you illustrated -- it took billions of years, how is it not possible to understand how this could have worked?
Honestly, the problem is, most people have ZERO grasp of basic biology concepts, so none of this makes sense to them. It's just serious academic fail.
Exactly. :-) The whole of recorded history takes up less than half the length of the first line of that block of 20 rows of dots... and that's just the history of modern humans... the people that came before that weren't even apes, they were just short humans with bigger bones and sloping foreheads compared to us.
FWIW, the argument about how big 4 billion is means nothing if you don't put it side by side with the big number of mutations that would be required to get from point a to point b. And it's still begging the question of how life evolved, which AFAIK is still an unsolved question. I would hardly want to take the side of a person who thinks that the Bible requires that we believe that God created the world a few thousand years ago -- but the argument here doesn't go through without a good deal more work
( ... )
The key difference between science and religion, though, is that science is self-correcting. There's no doubt that science gets things wrong. Horribly wrong (see eugenics). It can be used to validate biases and such. That's why it gets put up for peer review, retesting, criticism, etc. There is no end goal in science.
There is an end goal for religion, though, and anything that doesn't reach that goal must be twisted to follow in line.
Personally, I don't see much point in the science vs religion debate. They're two entirely different things. Plenty of people are able to reconcile their religious beliefs with their scientific beliefs. And as an atheist, I really don't care too much what religion says on anything unless it has decent facts and evidence supporting it (which most of the creationism aka intelligent design stuff doesn't).
In some cases (like evolution) there are end goals and that's what leads to the sort of bad science that delivered us Eugenics. That's all I'm saying. I think science works pretty well on stuff that doesn't have cultural resonance one way or another. But when a subject has cultural resonance? Peer review can hurt as often as it can help.
I'm not exactly sure what end goals evolutionary biology has. Is research sometimes done with the assumption that evolution is true? Of course. It's because evolution as a process is so vital to the field of biology, it's near-impossible not to have that assumption when working within it.
Do you have any examples of credible scientific evolutionary research that is biased to some ideological end goal a la eugenics?
It was largely on PM and started with a general discussion on the usefullness of religious dogma in real life in a Twilight (as in sparkles, not as in black mask)discussion.
I think the most usefull argument usually is that you can observe evoution of fast reproducing oraganisms like bacteria. They evolve so quickly a human lifespan is long enough to watch.
(and I meant to write timespan in my first post...my brain is so easily confused)
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As fascinating as this post is, I have to say my main reaction was "Ooh! Watership Down! Bunnies! So many bunnies!" ...and I just kinda sat there and kept doing that. Watership Down can distract me from just about anything. :)
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This is two bunnies:
..
This is the same group of bunnies after four years:
............
This is the same group of bunnies after 16 years:
[pageful of dots]
And so on. :-)
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Honestly, the problem is, most people have ZERO grasp of basic biology concepts, so none of this makes sense to them. It's just serious academic fail.
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There is an end goal for religion, though, and anything that doesn't reach that goal must be twisted to follow in line.
Personally, I don't see much point in the science vs religion debate. They're two entirely different things. Plenty of people are able to reconcile their religious beliefs with their scientific beliefs. And as an atheist, I really don't care too much what religion says on anything unless it has decent facts and evidence supporting it (which most of the creationism aka intelligent design stuff doesn't).
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Do you have any examples of credible scientific evolutionary research that is biased to some ideological end goal a la eugenics?
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Just had a very lenghty one with an antievolutionist on the BF.
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I think the most usefull argument usually is that you can observe evoution of fast reproducing oraganisms like bacteria. They evolve so quickly a human lifespan is long enough to watch.
(and I meant to write timespan in my first post...my brain is so easily confused)
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*bookmarks*
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