Evolution Debate ...

[Reverend Blair]

I raised the with a creationist Catholic on this very board, Mad Hatter. He refused to accept it.

That didn't really surprise me. I went to Catholic schools and there were many, many there...including the alleged teachers...who seemed to think that evolution was taught in school because the government said it had to be.

 

[Mad_Hatter]

Allow me to quote the late Pope John Paul II:

new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis... if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God.

Obviously not every Catholic will accept evolution, as obviously not every Protestant will accept Creationism. All I am trying to say is that belief in evolution and belief in God are not necessarily two mutually exclusive things.

 

[peapod]

Believe whatever you like, but again intelligent design is not science. It does not belong in a science class, it does not meet the defination nor does it provide any "actual" proof of its findings. There is a church on every corner for the intelligent design ideas...The defination of science has been laid out in this thread over and over again, intelligent design does not meet the criteria. But than again...fundies don't need to...just coz. Luckily science does not operate based on just coz.

 

[Reverend Blair]

All I am trying to say is that belief in evolution and belief in God are not necessarily two mutually exclusive things.

Most scientists, including those who work directly with the evolution of man and/or the creation of the universe, believe in some sort of god. Darwin himself was quite a devout Christian. It's very much part of our culture.

What they don't do is put their beliefs ahead of scientific thought, theory, and method. That's what this discussion is really about, Mad Hatter. I don't care what you believe if you keep it to yourself. The problem arises when those eith sprcific beliefs try to interject them into science, politics, or society at large.

 

[pastafarian]

It is obvious that this ceased to be an intellectual/scientific debate following the Scopes Monkey trial. It is a debate whose end is to increase the political,social and economic power of those who use Christianity to delude the ignorant, maintain the econmic status quo and prevent humanitarian progress towards an egalitarian society.

Every advance in every branch of the natural sciences confirms the essential truth of "descent with modification acted upon by natural selection" as the principal process that has generated the biodiversity that exists on Earth.

Whether it is the sole mechanism of speciation (I doubt it), and what all of the mechanisms by which mutations are recorded rather than corrected, by which natural selection operates and within what limits, by which genetic drift and mutation occur, is currently unknown.

Perhaps the leisurely pace of biological evolution has become irrelevant, given the aptitude of a particularly noxious form of hairless ape to perturb selective pressures beyond the rate of all but the smartest (most experienced) organisms to adapt. I mean, of course bacteria and viruses (for those who see the latter as "organisms").
Maybe we'd better hope that there is a" god of the gaps" because we got us a lot of quick evolving to do to keep up with global warming, deforestation, massive increses in UV levels, and the changing composition of our atmosphere, hyrosphere and soils.

To those who think they can be intellectually respectable while at the same time engage in the idolatry of textual literalism, I'll leave the words of the founder of the newest of the world religions:
"Religion must conform to science and reason, otherwise it is superstition. God has created man in order that he may perceive the verity of existence and endowed him with mind or reason to discover truth. Therefore scientific knowledge and religious belief must be conformable to the analysis of this divine faculty in man."

--Mirza Huseyn Ali (Bahaullah, founder of the Baha'i faith.)

 

[Reverend Blair]

Well put, Pastafarian. Without evolutionary theory, advancements in everything from medicine to agriculture simply would never have happened.

 

[NosyNed]

Most scientists, including those who work directly with the evolution of man and/or the creation of the universe, believe in some sort of god. Darwin himself was quite a devout Christian. It's very much part of our culture.

What they don't do is put their beliefs ahead of scientific thought, theory, and method. That's what this discussion is really about, Mad Hatter. I don't care what you believe if you keep it to yourself. The problem arises when those eith sprcific beliefs try to interject them into science, politics, or society at large.

Hello, I'm jumping into the discussion of one of my favourite topics.

I think "most" is used carelessly above. Some polls have been taken and the percentage is, IIRC, about 40% believers in the sciences. It varies with discipline and is rather constant over time.

For those with an obsessive interest in the topic you might want to peek into:
www.evcforum.net

This debate is the primary focus of discussions there.

Of course, none of us can be held to one focus all the time.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

wee diversion for a second..........but welcome to this corner of the internet . Glad to see another Vancouverite here.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Religion must conform to science and reason, otherwise it is superstition.

EXCELLENT!!!

 

[Andygal]

Religion must conform to science and reason, otherwise it is superstition.

I agree. That is an excellent quote and many people would do well to keep it in mind.

 

[Reverend Blair]

I think "most" is used carelessly above. Some polls have been taken and the percentage is, IIRC, about 40% believers in the sciences. It varies with discipline and is rather constant over time.

I don't agree, Ned. Other polls have shown as high as 70% believers within the sciences. It depends on the definition of "belief". 40% may be associated with one religion or another, but many others have kind of a vague belief in some sort of creator.

If you define belief as not being an atheist, then the numbers are quite different than if you define belief as being a set of tenets and rules.

 

[NosyNed]

I don't agree, Ned. Other polls have shown as high as 70% believers within the sciences. It depends on the definition of "belief". 40% may be associated with one religion or another, but many others have kind of a vague belief in some sort of creator.

If you define belief as not being an atheist, then the numbers are quite different than if you define belief as being a set of tenets and rules.

I haven't found the contents of the original polls. However, I recall that the 40% includes what most would call deists so it does, I think, include the "vague belief" category. I'll try to find more.

Meanwhile this link:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm

Seems to suggest the numbers are lower than the 40% rather than higher.

A(dded) B E(dit)

The percentages vary rather a lot by the particular disciplines and by what you mean when you say "scientist" as well. There seem to be a disproportionate number of engineers among the IDists for example. I'm sure most "real" scientists would not include engineers in their ranks though.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

It depends on the definition of "belief".

exactly !! If I "believe" that the sun will rise tomorrow..... that too is a "belief"........but does not make me a "believer" in (within) the "religious" context.

 

[Jo Canadian]

 

[pastafarian]

Without evolutionary theory, advancements in everything from medicine to agriculture simply would never have happened.

Reverend Blair, I have used that line or one similar to it many times before. However, eternal skeptic that I am, I wonder if it is true.

Selective plant breeding was a skill that, by all reputable accounts of the development of agriculture about 12000 years ago, must have been in place before the premeditated sowing and harvesting of plants.

Clearly, it was refined continually throught the Near and Far Eastern civilizations, the Amerinidian cultures and in Europe for millenia before the first recorded whispers of evolution by the Greeks. Ethnopharmacology, germ theory, disease epidemiology which led to the idea of sanitation (arguably the most significant conceptual development in Western medicine bar none), sulfa drugs, antibiotics, anaesthesia, and vaccines were all developed without explicit reference to evolutionary ideas.

In fact many predate evolutionary theory or were developed while it was still nothing more than a particularly radical philosophical notion.

In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of any advance in biology or medicine that requires any concepts that couldn't be formulated in an equally practical way using the assumption that Darwin was essentially wrong, and that --to use the language of creationists-- couldn't be explained by appeals to "microevolution" and the existence of "essentially" unaltered "kinds" since 4004 BC.

As it happens, I do use some of the ideas of evolutionary "distance" and natural selection in my job, but I'd have no trouble --if catastrophic head trauma suddenly caused me to exhibit Bible-related obtuseness that required spouting anti-Darwin mythology-- in finding alternate models for justifying procedures that achieve my ends.

I work with academic types whose specialisations require evolutionary ideas (environmental genomics, for example), but those disciplines exist because Darwin is assumed to be essentially correct.

I'm curious if you or anyone on this board can think of even one practical idea/technology that requires that evolution be true. I can't and i'm always on the lookout for more effective rhetorical tools to combat fundamoronism.

 

[zenfisher]

The little machine we're typing on is a classic example of how things evolve. Without advances we'd still be using knots in rope to count. Those ropes from the past may not be around anymore (much like some of our ancestors remains.)... but its evident from that start... knotted ropes to abacuses, counting machines, typewriters, adding machines, ,television, Computers with tubes, transistors, data punch machines, calculators, right up to todays laptops and desk computers, ( I know there is a ton I left out.) are a form of evolutuion.

While some call it progress...it is evolution and shows how each adaptation leads to the next change or need.

You can take any invention and show how it changes to meet the needs of society. Life works the same way. Change is required to meet the survival needs of most species.

You want some thing more basic...look at dog breeding...if evolution was just a "theory" there is no way we could have bred the different species of dogs we have. Look at the amount of adaptations and the specializations. ( this would apply to any animals we raise in captivity)

 

[Andygal]

You can take any invention and show how it changes to meet the needs of society. Life works the same way. Change is required to meet the survival needs of most species.

I did a project in grade 11 biology showing how various types of gaming systems have evolved from the old school NES to the new Gamecube and such.

 

[zenfisher]

Exactly Andygal...we generally write it off as progress...but it is evolution, a natural sense of progreesion.

 

[Reverend Blair]

The little machine we're typing on is a classic example of how things evolve. Without advances we'd still be using knots in rope to count.

I still do. Long division is a bitch though. :wink:

Selective plant breeding was a skill that, by all reputable accounts of the development of agriculture about 12000 years ago, must have been in place before the premeditated sowing and harvesting of plants.

We don't need to know about evolution for it to be true, though. If that were the case, we would have had to understand evolution before we cold have evolved to the point where we could understand evolution.

We certainly understood selective breeding when our knowledge was quite primitive, and that served us well to a point.

If you look at the strains of non-GM grain and oil seed grown today though, it is doubtful that we could have developed those crops without a knowledge of evolutionary theory, at least not as quickly as we did.

The same goes for livestock. The modern holstein cow is basically a Canadian creation. Holsteins from thirty years ago were no where near the breed that exists today. That was done through a knowledge of genetics.

Could it be done through "micro-evolution"? Yeah, but we wouldn't have known enough to do it.

Likely the most obvious example is canola though. It was still rape seed when I was a kid. Not too much of a kid either...I remember driving hoppers of it back to the bin by myself.

The scientists at the U of S took some plants of various strains and did some selctive breeding though. Now rape seed is called Canola. It produces more oil per seed, more seeds per plant, and more plants per acre. It is essentially an entirely different plant. That was done in less than a human generation. That would not have been possible without a working knowledge of evolution.

There are other examples. Dwarf grains are one. They likely prevented a major famine in Asia. They were developed over a few years because we understood the basics of evolution and were able to exploit them.

 

[zenfisher]

That just goes to show ya Rev..your a knotty boy 8O :wink: :twisted: :cheers: