I was going to disengage myself from this conversation, but I didn't want you to go away misunderstanding me. When I said I didn't mean your approach when I said "this theory," I meant the theory that I had explicated -- that death does not occur until after the Fall. The purpose of that sentence was merely to allow for the fact that the idea that there was no death before the Fall was a debtable subject. I was not citing any authority to contradict your beliefs on the subject. I would engage the rest of the question but I think Mr Paige has done a great job discussing the legal side of it. B-Bob, I would address your bottom-line argument that the recommendation letter is not a function of his professorship, but alas, you want to return to not taking the thread seriously. So I won't bother. But, I am disappointed that neither you nor anyone addressed the question of how in particular evolution is useful in the practiice of medicine, resorting instead to analogies.
One more time.... He is asking for a SCIENTIFIC answer, not a religous one. (And of course religous is synonymous with christian )
I can't see how telling his students to believe in evolution falls under seperation of church and state. Believing in evolution is about accepting what is theoritically and damn near factually correct in SCIENCE? If this kid takes a test, and a question about evolution comes up, what is he supposed to do? If he doesn't believe in evolution, then he can't really answer the question, so he would get that one wrong. Again, it isn't like the school required him to accept evolution to graduate or the prof did for him to pass the class. It's one of his requirements for writing a letter of recommendation which is a FAVOR. Once again, how does this fall under the law?
One more time? This is your first post: YoYaoYoYaoYoYao Junior Member Posts: 1 Joined: Feb 2003 Member: #10695
Sigh. Not caught up on last weekend's threads and already sucked into another. On evolution: I think that evolution is really a faith position, and not a scientific position at all. It is one of the central tenents(sp?) of the faith of Humanism. Its champions are essentially those who say, “The existence of God isn’t logical, therefore creation cannot have occurred, therefore there must be some other explanation for our existence, and since evolution, no matter how full of holes it is, is the best one we have, it must be true.” This is a precarious position to say the least and falls apart in many places, IMO. But this isn’t evolution in the way we are using the term. As Webster’s Dictionary defines it it is “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state.” Mutations or lateral adaptations (i.e. the famous example of the predominately white moths becoming black as their environment became polluted by soot) are not evidence of a life form achieving higher function, or becoming more complex. The moths didn’t become anything other than moths. Mutations that produce increased complexity are essentially unheard of. The typical response to this is that it happens over such a long time frame that we can’t see it. My response to that is that if there is no evidence to suggest that it’s even happening, then the belief that it is is not scientific. It’s a faith based belief. I disagree. In fact, if you replace creationists with evolutionists in the preceding paragraph it would be more accurate. As I said, there is very little evidence to suggest that evolution has ever occurred. In fact, the theory falls apart at its very first step. If everything evolved from a one celled organism X million years ago, where did that organism come from? And if you come up with a hypothetical “parent” for it, where did it come from? We can do this forever, of course, and you are left with the question, how do you get something from nothing? This is beyond our ability to comprehend, which strongly suggests, IMO, that there are forces or entities or an entity that exists that is beyond our ability to comprehend. (This would be, for many dictionaries, very close to the definition of a god, I suspect.) I’ve gone farther than I need to have though, because once we have agreed that something greater than our ability to comprehend miraculously created something from nothing, we have dispensed with the foundation that is the only real support for the theory of evolution. Even B-Bob agrees that that wonder and complexity of the world around us strongly suggest the presence of a higher power, a master planner. Once you’re there, there is no more need to try to prop up the faith based belief in evolution. The questions then become, did creation happen the way the bible says it did? Just what does the bible really say about creation anyway? Did creation happen some other way? Evolution builds a house on a cornerstone that doesn’t exist, and there is scant evidence to suggest that any of the connections between the building blocks ever existed either. So why do people cling to it so? This poor embattled professor seems to be suffering from a confused entanglement of his faiths, I think. And I don’t think he’s followed either path, the rigorous exploration of science or faith, enough to realise that they end up in the same place. They are part of the same whole.
Damn B-Bob, I knew you were cool for some reason. You're not... like... my best friend from SC are you? (oh nevermind... Bob... I get it). incidentally, what is your focus? I'm curious if you might know some of the people I know. btw, I'm not supposed to be responding to political threads... but I dare say, that JV... regardless of your atheism, you haven't freed yourself yet to fully understand the power of the forrrrce. j/k... but evolutionary genetics is a key component to being a decent medical doctor these days. Sure... maybe the basic mechanic type that shoves a line up your butt might not need to know "the HIV strain becomes resistant to single-mocktails of AZT within yadda yadda yadda time period", or "the European population is resistant to Aids by ~9% b/c of a putative resistance to the plague at the CCR5 delta-32", but the better doctors should be problem solvers... not repeaters or chefs. There are new infectious diseases (as well as some old friends) on the horizon. evolutionary biologists contribute a billion times over to medicine. It is simply uninformed to argue otherwise. It will be information from the evolutionary biologists (including people from the U of Utah, whoo-hoo!) that save all of our asses. ps, race and ideology? ummm... do do-gooders go to far, me thinks? bad analogy (though I've fallen victim to the do-gooders' curse for sure). deterministic traits (like rimbaud's testicular feminization) are things you shouldn't make fun of. You can, however, make fun of windy-road behavioral phenotypes and norms of reaction (like rimbaud's perm). good to see rimbaud back, there must be frequency dependent selection that makes him post when I'm not around (or he just doesn't like me *sniff* *sniff*). oh yeah, and this guy has a right to not write letters of recommendation for irrational people. Being uninformed is a defense, but common sense dictates that his students are asking for the letter of recommendation after taking his class (I'm assuming his class addresses these topics). Noone that studies evolution walks away saying "oh yeah, an invisible superbeast did all of this in a matter of days". Biology and Geology, Chemistry and Physics... all of science disagrees with such flights of fancy. If you're going to be a scientist, yep, you had better get a clue. More power to this guy.
I seriously have to quit wasting my time hitting my head against the wall talking to people that don't know what they're arguing against. Grizzles, I don't have time to destroy your entire post right now, but I do have to say that you are completely misinformed (I'd like to say this in a nice way... let me say, hey!!! ). Suffice it to say, that the fields of geology, biology that extrapolate from chemistry and physics completely disagree with you. Let's call that a big hurdle for you. Maybe you can explain why you fear that your God isn't powerful enough to have taken the path that the world of science has described. I, personally, never recall God saying "thou shalt not believe in evolution". This seems to be a fear driven reaction to all of modern science. So, before I address the ease with which you create something as simple as a lipid bilayer (first cause argument??? you're boring us w/ the first cause friggin' argument... what is this an undergraduate zombie b-movie? ), can you tell us why big powerful God wouldn't have done something as mundane as throw some beans in a bag and let drift/migration/selection and mutation take over? Honestly, I'm trying to say this in the most open minded way possible, there are a billion (non-moth related ) examples of evolution. Every friggin' day in every friggin' corner of the planet. You have no case. More on this later.
Um, my careful quotation was: "The funny thing is, if you look at the world scientifically, your brain will explode if you don't admit that there's something going on here that surpasses randomness and the human mind's ability to comprehend it. " Doesn't sound like a master planner, exactly. In fact, it could easily be spun as areligious.
No sooner said, than I have to promise myself... I... can't.. come... back.... Grizzled. Heal thyself! I have to accept that it's not my duty to inform you. You have begged the question for some pre-ordained reason that evolution has not occurred. There isn't a field in science that agrees with you (pick up any refereed journal on the planet). There are simply people that are afraid of the ramifications for conceding that the simplest thing on the planet has occurred. This isn't a fear that your God gave you. It is a historical fear that man has about losing his spirituality. Science has always dealt blows to the ignorance of the masses. Religion (the pople already has actually) will take this in stride. There will be hold outs, certainly, but they'll eventually cave too. When you come to know the fact of evolution, you'll merely absorb it into your own world view. There is no reason that God and evolution cannot coexist.
Hate to be picky, but I don't remember ever actually saying that. Achebe, I'd take the time to disagree with you but I think you're to busy being smarter than everyone to pay any attention. In my real final salute to this thread, I'll say this: no one is ever going to agree on this until the underlying issue is resolved: how do we know what we know? What's the point of butting heads over evolution and creation if no one will bother to find out why the other guy ascribes to the belief he does. Maybe Monday, I'll start a thread on this basis of knowledge.
Agreed B-Bob. I typed to hastily without checking your exact quote and consequently gave it a flavour it didn’t necessarily have originally. My apologies.
Please do explain Achebe. Science is at issue here and we both have science degrees, so let’s have it. What I’m saying is that “the world of science” isn’t always as scientific as may be commonly believed. I’m all for science, but I don’t see how real science get you to the evolution hypothesis. There just isn’t the evidence to support it. As I said, it is more based on faith than science, IMO. This doesn’t factor into my argument. Sorry it bores you, but it is one of the critical and insurmountable breaks in the theoretical chain of events. One that if actually considered, and not conveniently dismissed, pulls the rug out from under much the argument for evolution. Let’s have them then. A sly trick Achebe. You would have me spend hours searching for proof instead of you. I will find some for you, when I get a chance. There are lots of scientists who believe in creation, (and note that I only refuted evolution and didn’t go so far as to say that creation was the only option. There is evidence that points in that direction, IMO, but that conclusion is ultimately based on spiritual exploration and faith, not logical reasoning). But I’ll leave you with these comments now. There is more than a little bit of politics and power games and “establishment positions” and even faith, in the field of science. Ever read TS Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? There was a time when the scientific community believed the world was flat. There was a time when they thought the sun revolved around the earth. The even did nasty things those daring enough to dissent. You know the saying, the more things change the more they stay the same. So I challenge you to address the issue on its own merits, and not just toe the establishment line. Sadly, “science” has also been a purveyor of ignorance, a guardian at the gates of ignorance. So “science” should not be blindly followed, at the expense of good science. And you are quite right that there is no reason to believe that God and evolution could not exist together, if there was any convincing reason to believe that any evolution had actually occurred at all. (Just of the sake of context. I was in the “God and evolution” camp before I started finding out that the evidence for evolution really quite shaky. I don’t see the bible necessarily excluding the possibility of evolution, for example, but my suspicions now are that the case for it has been greatly overstated.)
Grizzled, I had forgotten that we had something else in common (don't we both enjoy the same bands... ie, SuperChunk/Portastatic, etc?). I had forgotten that you have a science degree too... wasn't it Geology (it seems perverse that someone that would study half-life mechanics or simplistic laws of superposition or paleobiology would ever disagree with evolutionary theory... but I guess that's why this guy wants to make sure his students aren't regurgitators j/k ), or was it something more mechanistic like Chemistry/Physics? Anyway, I wasn't actually trying to pull a 'sly' trick. I actually think I'm a loser for spending so much time on this site. The most emotive threads are the easiest to get drawn into (by definition of course). Since my initial fear is that you've begged the question as to the topic, and you counter that's not the case... let's decide what the path should be for our conversation. I'm not really sure where you disagree with evolution. Do you have an issue w/ selectionist theory vs neutralist theory (this is still evOlution). Do you just hate population genetics and statistics? Where are you in your understanding/disagreement of evolutionary theory? Lets iron that out before I give a random laundry list of anecdotes. Of course the rock record is abound with a billion anecdotes, labs observe differences in allelic frequencies that translate for proteins that procure some adapative advantage every friggin' day... one observes some population undergo the evolutionary process. This is isn't just 'establishment', this is empiricism. This is common sense. This is the stuff that 19th century farmers said "so what to", because they had been artificially selecting things themselves for eons. Hell, today I learned of some weirdo eugenecist attempt to modify rice to use C4 photosynthesis. Frankenstein... but selection is obvious to you, I'm sure. Where are you in your mindset? It may be poignant to break down evolutionary theory to its core constituents. Mutation - empirically observed... (cycstic fibrosis, etc. etc.), drift - empirically observed (see 'reasons not to screw your cousin' - 'F' - coefficient of inbreeding and exposing deleterious alleles to selection by increases in homozygosity), migration - empirically observed (new alleles into a population... ie, you buy your kid sister a ticket to East Africa and she introduces new alleles (that are largely swamped in this example)) and of course selection (a bias towards those alleles that code for proteins that are functionally beneficial rather than all of those alleles that are deleterious and *yummy yummy* impugn our fitness). Anyway, where are you in your understanding/disagreements with the fact of evolution? Each of the four constituents that I have listed have been empirically observed. We can discuss each of those components ad nauseum. I have an intuition that you have a problem w/ neutralist theory vs selectionist theory... but those are both still evolutionary processes. Anyway, let me know where you are.
Engineering. Civil Engineering. (Enjoyed my geology classes, btw.) And yes, I think we do like similar kinds of music, (Ween, The New Pornographers) but I’ve been on a more folky, singer-songwriter kick recently. (The Waifs, Kathleen Edwards - both are good but not great.) What I’m referring to is the evolution of lower life forms into higher life forms (see the definition I used in my above post). This relates to the “where did we come from” question. I don’t dispute that the white moths were selectively eaten when the trees became blackened. What I do say is that this adaptation does not suggest that amoebas became apes, only that this species, as seen in many others, has the ability to adapt laterally within a certain range. There is flexibility built into the design, but I don’t know of any examples that show any organism becoming more complex to adapt to its environment. The moth didn’t grow a barb to ward off the predator birds, for example. This upward evolution is merely supposition on the part of the evolutionists, I suggest. There is other supporting evidence too, of course. Off the top of my head, the fact that we don’t see a continuum organisms, and instead see distinct groups of related animals runs counter to the theory of upward evolution. As does the time estimated to achieve evolution from a single celled organism to what exists on earth today. This number would be extremely large. You also mention various detrimental mutations, mutations that limit function, not enhance it. These surely do occur, and natural selection often weeds them out, and yes this supports a healthy gene pool, but again, the organism never becomes something other than the organism. It may be tall and strong and healthy, within the limits of what its DNA will allow, but I don’t know of an instance of DNA becoming more complex. (Apart from genetic engineering perhaps, but that may be debatable too, and we’d undoubtedly have to define “complex” more precisely.)
Hey <b>Grizzled</b> - just wanted to mention that I appreciate your posts on the subject. As a science professional, I know how to speak the language of evolution and all about how it's supposed to work. And I try to keep an open mind. Still, I think there has been way too much presupposition and the cart put before the horse - in other words, instead of taking the scientific evidence as it comes, the science community already has an idea of what they want that evidence to mean and how they want it to fit into their little scheme of things. In certain fields of biology, it would be blasphemy to say anything else. Of course, the true spirit of scientific inquiry works only with the data it's given and puts all personal bias aside. Frankly I don't see that here. People seem to need a religion, something to build their worldview around. Some take science as a religion, some take atheism as a religion. I just don't know why people get so upset. If someone was trying to advocate a form of creation from some strange religion that I found unacceptable (i.e. we were planted here by aliens), I wouldn't understand why they believed it, but it would be OK with me as long as they 1) knew how to explain the commonly accepted belief system, in order to communicate with other scientists, and 2) didn't take the alien thing as an assumption and build on it when they published their works in physical science. I don't know why people are so concerned with others' beliefs in that area. When I was 14, I had been planning to be a scientist but I finally decided I had seen too much of this stuff, and wondered if there was a place for a Christian in the science establishment, since some of them would like to shut us out. I considered studying everything ranging from political science to engineering, but eventually came back to science - this time, chemistry, which is considerably less controversial. I'd hate to be working within the biology or physics establishment right now, though. I say very little about the subject in my professional life, but it's hard working every day with people who are hostile to your belief system. However, we are out there, and there are more of us than you might think. And, who knows, God could have used evolution to create the world, but I'm not going to assume anything until I have more proof than what we have now.
Since you are quoting Tears for Fears... <i>Maybe once, even twice, He said, "God does not play dice." Yeah, if he's everywhere, He's in casinos with aces to spare. Love is God's mistake.</i>
Great conversation Grizzled, Isabel (reviewing my previous post, I have to apologize for all of my spelling & grammar mistakes; incidentally, my explanation of drift is weak... suffice it to say that drift is due to a 'sampling error' in a finite population (a decay of heterozygosity that one would expect in an infinite population, sorry for the babble... took an evolutionary genetics class last fall)... typically if you flip a coin 10 times you're fine w/ 6 heads and 4 tails... drift operates just as erroneously (not due to pure probabilities, ie the coin's 50/50 normal distrubition)... small populations don't exhibit gametogenesis in the proportions that one would expect b/c N is small). Isabel, I'm sorry to hear that you feel ostracized by the rest of the scientific community... unfortunately, empiricism is the game, eh? (ps, you were awfully self-actualized at the age of 14 to 'know' that your faith was being harassed by science ... can we say "begging the question". lol j/k j/k). Grizzled, you refer to a debate between macroevolution and microevolution. You concede microevolutionary forces (whether you label it so or not). For example, when you have a bunch of drosophila, some Adh-fast alleles and some Adh-slow alleles (assume bialleleic w/ Adhfast == A1, Adhslow == A2, so populations A1A1 and A1A2 and A2A2), and then dump them all in ethanol, you'll notice that the Adh-slow guys are all screwed (if I have the anecdote correct) and the allelic frequency of A2 decreases in the population (there's a weird correlation, btw, with latitude and this allele... I don't know the story... anyway-). You seem to be fine with such an example. This is what I understand as your notion of a 'lateral' shift in allelic frequency. This isn't limited to your notion of 'lateralism' however. You can fix, or lose an allele... you can generate new alleles by transversions, duplications, deletions, there are all sorts of mistakes that occur in us. For single nucleotide mistakes one is apt to have a nonsynonymous (amino acid changing) change in pretty much 2/3 of just this simple change (though the change is infrequent... ~10^-5/nucleotide site). When you lose or fix an allele... evolution is occurring at the microevolutionary level. Gene frequency changes are the things we're made of on a macro level (sorry I'm posting quickly and incoherently... gotta go pick up the wife). On the macroevolutionary scale, *whoa*, why didn't you say so? This is the thing that we stand on. There is oodles and oodles of evidence. Descent by modification in the rock record is what got Darwins' attention to begin with. In your geology courses, they probably referred to a key tenet... the 'law of superposition'. Simply put, stratigraphy that overlies other stratigraphy is younger than the underlying strata (barring some tectonic mishap... which you can readily observe... I'm supposed to go now, arghgh). The bones lying in those strata are readily dated by a number of techniques (typically radioactive isotopic techniques... K/Ar... Iridium.... etc.). When you go to the East African rift valley, for example, you can find hominids with our skeletal structure from the neck down about 2.0 mya, before ~2.5 mya the viscera is more like a chimp (bell shaped... not for a runner) and the glenoid fossa of the scapula is oriented for an organism that brachiates and/or walks on all fours. All the while, the foramen magnum is axially aligned such as ours. Go back 3.5 mya and you have the famous Lucy with her broad, beautiful flaring pelvis (baby got back). At that same time, the Laetoli footprints (gotta go) lie gorgeously for all to observe... Ok... my wife has pointed out a website called talkaboutorigins.org that one of the undergrads in a class she tas mentioned. Hopefully its not a random straw man that I'm suggesting as a reading source... but maybe it'll be something interesting for any and all/to read. Hopefully I'll be able to argue more coherently/persuasively tomorrow (its a broad hurried brush right now). There are plenty of homologous traits that illustrate evolution through the rock record. Suffice it to say, that its pretty persuasive when you see the gracile australiopithecines (bipedal chimps basically) overlain by dumb Homo-habilis, overlain by thick brow ridged Homo erectus... up to the larger brained Archaics and then into the moderns... is pretty compelling that descent by modification is spot on. Nighty night (aghahgha, my wife's going to leave me... and it's all b/c "I might be addicted to this website").
