In The Beginning...
So before we can discuss Susan's nuggets of insight, I must first introduce you to when I realised she was pretty special. We went down the pub after work and were having the kind of the post-work chat that gets progressively more interesting the more drinks are consumed. We were chatting about evolution, to which Susan revealed "oh I don't believe in all that". Susan, it transpires, believes in creationism.
Since I suspect no-one is currently reading this, you (the reader) are essentially fictional and as such I appreciate that some of you may be fictional Americans. This creationism idea may seem less wacky to you because you have met people who believe in it, or indeed you yourself believe in it. But in England, even the priests I've known have taken a rather pragmatic approach to the Old Testament (please note the use of capital letters for out of respect for my fictional creationist reader) and appreciate that a lot of it and Genesis in particular are allegorical.
This isn't in itself a display of stupidity but merely religion-inspired ignorance which is of course entirely subjective. Over the following weeks I tried to push her on this, and the truth of the matter is that she doesn't understand the basic principles of evolution- she can not get her head around a process taking millions of years- an ape isn't a man therefore evolution is a lie. Therefore in her eyes, to believe in evolution is a matter of faith rather than common sense.
Which on the one hand ably demonstrates her stupidity but on the other it means that her position on it is that I'm a fool because I believe anything I'm told, unquestioningly.
Needless to say, the irony was lost on her.
posted by Si @ 10:08 AM
11 comments
11 Comments:
From a "fictional" reader:
How much study have you done on the Theory of Evolution?
Are you aware that there is a Theory and a Law of Evolution, and the two are quite separate things?
The Law: Over time, things change.
The Theory: Over a very long time, things change into something else.
The Theory is called such because it is just that--a theory. As it so happens, it also contradicts many established Laws of science:
The Law of Entropy: Things left to themselves over time degenerate into chaos, not into more ordered forms.
Law #2: You can't get something from nothing.
This is just a start.
Please check the following link for an interesting article about the science of creationism and the faith of evolution:
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=246
That is, if you dare.
Susan may not have had all the answers in her pub discussion, but there is plenty available on the Internet.
Have you ever wondered why they are called "missing" links? Because maybe there haven't been any found? Ever?
Wow- a reader! The reason there's a law and a theory is surely that a law can be established and proved by scientists, whereas the theory requires scientific study over a course of centuries which can't be done as the theory of evolution is, in human terms, very recent. Scientists have this nasty habit of not claiming something is true unless they KNOW it is. Something religion doesn't have a problem with. I will read the link- its the least I can do after you took the time to post. If its any consolation Susan wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about.
LOL about Susan.
Interesting that scientists are actually trying to find an alternative to the Big Bang Theory as the start to the universe, since the inevitable question with that is "Where did that ball of matter come from in the first place?" Which usually has some discomfiting answers.
If I can find links about this, I'll post them. But not tonight. Too tired. Must sleep. (So tired, sentences no longer have subjects, and are reduced mostly to two words. Hmmm--now you think I'm like Susan? :-) )
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Actually Big Bang theory isn't too much in the rough, They have evidence to point to an accelleration in expansion of the universe from a single point in time. They have no evidence to point to anything else. Sooooo.... scientific evidence points to a big bang...
There has also been shown to be a decelleration in the rate of accelleration.... So at some point in the future the universe will stop expanding... and mathematically speaking if the trend were to continue, would start contracing... This theoretically points not to an ever expanding universe, but rather an oscillating one, which expands and contracts over time.
If only science had matured to this level a few thousand years ago, scientists would have been able to collect more data to support this theory.
It's merely a development of existing scientific knowledge, not a complete rubbishing of decades, centuries of work by boffins whom, I don't doubt, are somewhat more qualified to discuss the matter than you, Susan and this genius all are:
http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/
Of course, L-Ron says that Jesus was a scientist. Maybe you should give L-Ron some money and he can make us all happy.
And don't get me started on "You can't get something from nothing", petal. That's a hell of an easy one to disprove.
Well, I dunno if scrapnqueen's gonna read this but someone might and I've got a few minutes to kill, so...
Here's the thing - "You can't get something from nothing" seems to be a pretty solid sciency law. "Where did the huge ball of matter come from in the first place?" Probably from an equivalently humongous ball of energy, if you're believing the something doesn't come from nothing/ matter-energy exchange thing. Imagine a universe's worth of energy existing a split second before the big bang. That's quite a lot of energy. What about a split second before that? A Big Crunch? Might explain where the big ball of energy came from...
The energy could have done nothing, in which case no-one would be around to know about it (and what would be the point of that?), or it could have turned into matter, which it certainly seems to have done, probably with a great big fat bang. Well, there was nothing else to do, so, heck... PHOOMPH.. universe.
If you want to call that energy God and pray to it, fair enough. It is, after all, pretty amazing. I imagine scientists would call it 'potential energy' and try to measure it in the hope of finding out something useful. Whatever you call it doesn't change whatever it was, it happened a very very long time ago, and we'll never be able to go back and find out.
The laws of science (like entropy) stop working in extreme conditions, like black holes or big bangs, and lets not forget entropy is just a human concept, as open to criticism as evolution. As an aside, the theory of chaos shows that patterns and order arise naturally from seemingly random and chaotic circumstances, so evolution and entropy might not be so opposed after all, and might be re-written as "Things left to themselves degenerate into chaos, from which patterns and order emerge".
But forget the theories and just watch a bunch of small insects for a week. They have very short life-cycles so you can watch many generations change or 'evolve' over a week. Pretty much proves evolution happens I reckon.
Most scientific theories fall apart under some circumstances, probably cos we can only really look at a tiny bit of our universe at any one time, and make our best guesses based on what we see. Relativity's a pretty cool theory, and if you apply it to absolutely everything, you might conclude that even the best laws of science only work on a relative scale, which isn't really such a big problem. We got along relatively okay thinking the world was flat for a pretty long time.
Science is hard (lots of books to read, lots of conflicting opinion, tons of research, big words) and religion is very very easy (just one book - calling chapters 'books' is cheating). Actually, that's unfair - there are hundreds of holy books in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and the rest, most of which were written a long time before El Biblio, and might even be considered a form of early science - i.e. 'what we think about the world today'.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter where we all came from so much as where we're going, and in the same way as I wouldn't travel to south america using a 2000 year old map, I 'd rather base my view of the presnet and future on the latest information and opinion rather than stuff written in a time when racism, slavery, feudalism and crucifixion were the things the cool kids were into.
As a final word, George W Bush (murdering, war-mongering, vote-rigging, drink-driving, gay-hating idiot son of a child-molesting satanist)is Empire America's poster-boy for Creationism, while genius ultrabrained robo-human Stephen Hawking humbly states that there is room for God to exist even /within/ the concept of evolution.
Now watch this drive...
As The late, great Bill Hicks once said "Isn't it interesting that those people who say they don't believe in evolution... all look so damned unevolved?!"
Just re-reading your post and noticed your comment about entropy. The law is not as you state it, rather it is something like:
The entropy of the universe has an overall tendency to increase [as time passes].
I'm not sure how this sides against evolution, since entropy , and chaos, can be loosely equated to complexity. As such, when a single celled organism is left to it's own devices [omission on your part: and under constant external pressure to adapt to survive] it's metamorphosis into an eye, leg, lung or spleen can be considered an increase in entropy.
And for your information, the 'missing links' are the smaller, sub-links between the dozen or so links that have been found??? Considering how gradually evolution would occur, do you think we'll be able to map out a definitive ladder without a single rung missing?! That wouldn't so much be an evolutionary chain as a very long, thin piece of string.
You know what? Like the revered Dr Hawking, I'm even prepared to meet you half way and say:
I would concur, until sufficent evidence has been amassed to prove otherwise, that there is a possibility that evolution could be considered the work of an ethnographically arbitrary 'Celestial Timemaker(s)'.
I'm afraid I will, however, always insist that my liver made itself.
I should really leave this alone, I've got better thigs to do and I don't wan't debaser_51's brand-new (and somwehat humorous) blog to turn into Mr-The-Cat's flame-war against creationists; it's just that their stultifyingly misguided yet unstoppable zeal makes me SO angry, particularly when it's backed up by their trademark pseudo-science. Were it not for the overwhelming majority of these generally underwhelming zealots (or "Crackpots" as they are more commonly referred to on this side of the Atlantic), we might well have found the answers 'scrapnqueen' is looking for during the renaissance, the world might not be so damned overpopulated and orgies mightn't have gone out of fashion at the same time as togas: Throw 'em to the lions!
Feel free to argue about creationism. it winds me up too. What annoys me a great deal is that the link that scrapnqueen left tries to discredit evolutionism by saying that scientists have thought up an answer and then tried to work backwards to find evidence and that this very method is inherently flawed. Stop me if I'm wrong, but the very nature of creationism is that it starts with the conclusion "God made it", and then doesn't even bother to find evidence to back it up, but just picks anecdotal holes in other people's theories. I can't imagine anything less scientific.
Top comment says "The Law of Entropy: Things left to themselves over time degenerate into chaos, not into more ordered forms."
This misses out a vital part of the law!
"In an enclosed space, all things tend toward entropy"
And Earth is very much an unenclosed space, where we have chairs, jam, paper, Kenya, evolution, nail varnish, Ikea, anything we like.
"Are you aware that there is a Theory and a Law of Evolution, and the two are quite separate things?
The Law: Over time, things change.
The Theory: Over a very long time, things change into something else."
No, there isn't a 'law' of evolution, although there should be (see below).
This poster is trying out the old 'micro- vs macro-evolution' canard. Creationsts can't deny that things change any more - just point to selected breeding and tell them to work it out for themselves. So they counter with "ah, but cows just evolve into other cows, they don't evolve into a new species". They call the former 'micro-evolution' and admit it happens and the latter 'macro-evolution' and claim (for no obvious reason) that it doesn't.
The argument exploits ignorance over what constitutes a species, as though there is something magical about the definition. Really, the concept of species is quite artificial - it is something we humans have imposed for convenience - it doesn't really *mean* anything - there is no real barrier preventing one species becoming another. Look up Ring Species on the web and you'll see what I mean.
The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is indeed 'just' a theory. What scientists do is form a hypothesis to explain something they see in the world around them. Then they design tests for that hypothesis. If it passes these tests, this constitutes evidence that the hypothesis is correct. It doesn't *prove* it, but it suggests it might be true. When a hypothesis passes loads and loads of tests over a long period of time and therefore collects lots of evidence in its favour and nobody can seem to break it, people start calling it a scientific theory.
A scientific theory is therefore a very powerful thing and calling it 'just' a theory doesn't devalue it in any way. However, creationists deliberately use confusion between the everyday definition of 'theory' (something tentative or possibly untrue - somehow unreliable) with the scientific definition (something backed by a huge amount of evidence) to try to make their ideas sound more respectable. Pathetic, really.
A 'law' is just a theory that, by convention, people have started calling a law, usually because it is so obviously about right. The 'law' of gravity, for example, is 'only' a theory too. So is entropy. So is evolution by natural selection.
Evolution doesn't contradict entropy at all. This is yet more standard creationist drivel. The law of entropy only holds in a closed system - one that doesn't exchange energy with the outside world. This is not the case with the Earth - it gets heat and light from the Sun, for example. So entropy doesn't hold and the argument is complete nonsense. Of course, even if entropy did hold, the argument would still be wrong. Entropy is a statistical law and you would certainly expect local pockets of order, which could account for the evolution of life - although it might be unlikely.
"Law #2: You can't get something from nothing."
I'm not sure what this nonsense has to do with evolution. Presumably the poster is refering to the law of conservation of energy. I don't know why though, because it is completely irrelevant. Nobody is suggesting that evolution is about something from nothing. This sounds like yet another creationist canard - that evolution is somehow related to the origin of life. It isn't. It's about what happened after life began. But the argument doesn't say anything about the origin of life anyway. It didn't start with nothing - there was heat, light, chemicals and so on. I wouldn't call that 'nothing'. I expect the poster is talking about the big bang and has somehow related this in his/her confused brain to evolution. The theory of evolution has nothing to do with the big bang at all.
"Have you ever wondered why they are called "missing" links? Because maybe there haven't been any found? Ever?"
This is simply nonsense. *Every* fossil is 'transitional' in this sense. There are also huge numbers of fossils that show traits of two different species - these are precisely transitional fossils or missing links. As the poster said, the web has a lot of resources about this.
Creationists just lie about it, probably to themselves as much as to everyone else. Read any creationist sites and you'll get exactly the same easily refuted arguments. Have a look at http://www.talkorigins.org/ if you want a much better refutation (with lots of cited evidence) than the one I've just given.
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