Darwin Evolving Into A Tricky Exhibit 1364
rbochan writes "The new Darwin Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History
has 'failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution' according to articles at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Telegraph, and The Register. The $US3 million needed for the exhibit was met by private charitable donations."
Re:The Dumbing-Down Of America, part XXVII (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agenda..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Agenda..... (Score:5, Informative)
He did not (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Dumbing-Down Of America, part XXVII (Score:5, Informative)
The best example is the shape of the Earth. To the ancient Hebrew tribes, their cosmology being based on Mesopotomian notions, the Earth was a flat disc covered by a crystal dome. This is seen plainly in the cosmology put forth in Genesis 1. However, by Greco-Roman times, the spherical shape of the Earth was well known, and no Jew of that period would have doubted that. Thus the older Hebrew cosmology could not be seen as literally true, so Genesis was not read literally.
It is very unfortunate that a certain small breed of Christian has decided to rewrite two thousand years of theology and in the process turn their holy book into an object of derision. A literal reading of Genesis makes it clearly false, and to make it jive, the Literalist ends up having to find interpretations so strained and inane that it undermines their whole position.
Re:The Dumbing-Down Of America, part XXVII (Score:3, Informative)
You're blaming a belief in the supernatural to Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Are you insane? Have you ever watched any of those shows? You think for a second that some teenager sees Sarah Michelle Gellar kicking a vampire or Alissa Milano disappearing in a bad special effect and decides, "Hey, you know what? Maybe there IS a god." Supernatural has about as much effect on people's attitudes toward the afterlife as Nightmare on Elm Street did.
The ghost documentaries probably do some harm, I'll grant you that, because they pretend to give actual evidence, and I really wish they'd stop.
Re:Why not big pharma? (Score:4, Informative)
You have to remember there are plenty of evolutionary paths for any organism to follow. Humans arguably have evolved somewhat separately while still maintaining compatible DNA. Let us take a look at the case of skin pigmentation. People in the northern most extremes of the world like Scandinavia and Russia developed light skin pigmentations because our bodies did not require as much protection from sun light in these areas. The days were shorter and sunlight exposure as such was also shorter, because of locality. Look at people as you move further south, skin tones begin to get darker the longer your days and more direct your sunlight begins to get. You have people in the Mediterranean and Middle East with darker, "olive" skin and as you move into Africa you begin to get individuals with even darker skin.
The Evolution of man is actually well documented from early ape-like humans to modern man of today. Evolution is a long process and not something you can expect to see overnight. Animals and plants have adapted to their environments and find ways to survive, and the ones that survive go on to breed until the new traits have replaced the older ones completely, or a divergence occurs and a new species incompatible with the previous occurs.
Please check out this site [talkorigins.org] and if you come up with a new argument that actually attempts to present fact then please feel free.
Re:uhm, hardly. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You say it like it's a bad thing... (Score:2, Informative)
The Farm [msichicago.org] exhibit might as well be called John Deere.
Or the Petroleum Planet [msichicago.org]. It has a kid-targeted exhibit/game called "41 Days to Glory". Instructions (literal quote):
"Transport crude oil from Saudi Arabia to the Chicago area in time for the big NASCAR race."
Another quote:
"Our national reserve currently has approximately 150 billion barrels of crude oil - enough for another 70 years".
Umm, yay? Or the Enterprise Exhibit [msichicago.org]. It features a climbing wall/"adventure game" for small kids (pic [msichicago.org]). Quote on the wall:
"Our competitor is suing us over our juggling reindeer campaign. Should we: a) settle the lawsuit? b) go to court?"
So, yes, based on this I'd say we should keep corporate money out of museums.
Re:Evolution is Theory After All (Score:5, Informative)
Evolution does not guarantee that any structure will form. Intelligence is one solution to a particular set of problems, but the overwhelming number of organisms on this planet survive without even possessing more than one cell. However, that being said, intelligence of any kind will give an organism some specific benefits as far as judging, measuring and accumulating information about the environment. Rerun the tape from say, 500 million years ago, and there's no guarantee that you would have any organism with a brain larger than a few thousand neurons. But once you do have organisms with nerve bundles capable of not only receiving sensory data, but manipulating it, then such a species will overcome some of the barriers to such an expensive adaptation (remember, all structures require energy to develop and maintain, which is eye the biomass of this planet is overwhelmingly unicellular). As each member of a population is going to have some variation, some members will have larger or more complicated neural networks, and providing that such a feature of the primitive brain makes those particular members even slightly more likely to survive and reproduce, then, statistically, you will start to see brain size and complexity increase.
This is precisely what we see with hominid evolution. The earliest bipedal apes had brains little larger than a chimpanzee's. As we can see from modern chimps, a larger brain isn't necessarily required for survival. But for early hominids bipedalism meant a new environment, new pressures that a larger brain would make individual members more likely to reproduce. To loosely paraphrase Richard Dawkins, half a brain is better than no brain at all.
You seem to assume that there is some direction to evolution, that somehow a brain must be an inevitable organ, or that human intelligence is some necessary result of some ladder of evolution. Well, it isn't. It's simply good fortune on our part that a larger neural organ in some distant ancestor gave that critter a slight edge in the survival game. Play the tape again, and you might not have anything more complex than a planarian.
But evolution is not a shit-at-the-wall discipline. It makes some key predictions which have been confirmed numerous times since Darwin's day. The faunal progression was the earliest confirmation, but is no longer the most important. The key evidence for evolution now is the molecular data, which clearly shows, as was predicted, that all extant organisms fit within a nested hierarchy with its root to be found in a single common ancestor. With each species we analyze the genome of, we find this key observation only bolstered. All life on this planet came from a single common ancestral population, probably 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago, though horizontal gene transfer means that it won't be a single ancestor, but rather a small bush of unicellular organisms swapping genes.
Re:Evolution is Theory After All (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone who read our exchange is laughing at this point. I punched holes in your first argument and now you claim I support you.
I say 100,00 years ago the first signs of human intellidence appear, you say over the course of 3.5 million years. How is it we survived? According to the theory of evolution and "survival of the fittest", we shouldn't be here. But we are. Why?
We survived because our intelligence, developed over the course of 3.5 million years, advanced faster than our predators in that same time frame.
Again, you should be getting this from an anthropology text.
Look at it another way: wouldn't certain animal species that use elaborate mechanisms (think peacock) to attract mates also be more attractive to predators and easier to catch and kill? I mean a peacock can't do shit. *I* can catch one and I'm fat lazy bastard. How come they survived? And how exactly and why did they develop the way they did?
Your statement assumes that peacocks of today existed as they did before humans began domesticating animals. If you are looking for an animal that can't protect itself from predators, look at cattle. They can barely give birth to a calf due to the fact that humans have protected them from predators for thousands of years.
Evolution in action.
And don't get me wrong. I don't think reading some 4,000 year old book did it. There is some other explanation for it, and I leave it up to the scientists to figure those things out. The theory of evolution is a start, but it IS flawed or in another sense incomplete.
I would suggest reading Origins of the Species first before claiming evolution doesn't exist. It can be found here [gutenberg.org].
Re:Evolution is Theory After All (Score:3, Informative)
I've heard similar arguments before and they always boggle my mind. If it were true that the peacock's plumage would attract more predators, then there would be no peacocks now REGARDLESS of how they got that way, yes? The whole point is moot. As for the specific example, the birds are naturally skittish and surprisingly tough for their size and weight (read: metatarsal spurs).
Anyway, it's amazing to me how many people say "I have never heard a valid explanation for X, so the theory is wrong" when they clearly haven't done any research on the topic. No, unless you subscribe to the right journals, nobody has mailed you any theories on the evolution of intelligence. No, nobody mentioned it on the subway. You haven't overheard any good conversations on it in any bars. There are people doing a lot of research on the topic, though, even if you haven't been exposed to much of it as a lay person.
I could just as easily say that computer engineering is stupid because nobody took the time out to spoon feed me an explanation of how field effect transistors work. That would be stupid, though. I could just take some classes and read up on the physics and convince myself that these electrical engineers aren't a bunch of crackpots. I have no idea why people get away with lazy armchair criticism of biology when they'd get called on it for so many other topics.
Re:Agenda..... (Score:2, Informative)
If I understand this correctly, Darwin started out quite religious, slowly came to reject Christianity and the thought of any god at all, then settled on being agnostic. Here's a couple paragraphs that I thought stood out:
Based on the entire chapter (not just the bit I've pasted here), it seems Darwin didn't really like Christianity when he wrote Origin of the Species. Of course, this just explains his beliefs, and doesn't really say how much these beliefs influenced his writing, so I guess it's not really proof of anything.
But whether or not you agree with him religiously, he seemed to put a great amount of thought into his beliefs, and I think he should be respected for that.
Re:Evolution is Theory After All (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, they can: their feathers make it them look menacing to would-be predators. Now you may not find it very scary, but then again, you probably don't run around naked eating raw meat either.
The theory of evolution is a start, but it IS flawed or in another sense incomplete.
Why "IS" it flawed? Genetic science sure seems to provide a lot of emperical support for evolution having taken place and still taking place. Aren't you familiar with antibiotics?
Re:The Dumbing-Down Of America, part XXVII (Score:1, Informative)
please, just go to http://www.biblegateway.com/ [biblegateway.com] and see how many different versions there are.
Also, unless you are reading the bible in it's original ARAMAIC as a fluent reader, you can't possibly say that you are reading the One True Bible.
Go to Harvard Divinity School if you want to learn more about this from smart people.
proof of evolution seen in micro labs every day (Score:2, Informative)
That is evolution. That is evolution happening in *one* generation.
This test is done every day in every large chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics company in the world, thousands of times. It is an industry standard. It is observable, repeatable, and proveable.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation sez that there have been roughly 10 trillion generations of bacteria in the history of life. If we can see bacteria go from starving to suddenly able to digest and live on lactose in just one generation, how much more could they do in 10 trillion generations? Develop eyes? Seems pretty low-caliber to me. Imagine how much more they could've done in that period if intelligently guided: we'd all be immortal, telepathic, and flying.
(here's a partial discussion of mutagenesis and restriction plating. [nature.com])
Re:Most disturbing..... (Score:1, Informative)
What about China? More than 5000 years of histroy without disruption.
Re:Most disturbing..... (Score:2, Informative)
Hinduism. 4000-5000 years and counting.
http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/worldstud/9
Re:You're in the minority. (Score:2, Informative)
As much as I don't like the intelligent design folks, this is not a valid argument. ID doesn't say that evolution *never* happens - that would be a truly ridiculous claim, since there's direct evidence of it all over the place in the bacterial and viral worlds. Instead, they say that evolution can't explain *all* diversity, and that the big steps were magically instigated by a higher power.
So an ID person can quite happily live with drug design based on evolutionary principles, since they believe low-level evolution does happen.
Nothing hurts the argument against ID more than making an invalid point - they jump on it and demolish it, and make their side look stronger in the process to people who don't know what to believe. Remember that most of these people don't care what the truth is, they just want to win the argument, and they'll play dirty to do it.
Re:Know one think, they just follow the crowd (Score:2, Informative)
What's not being taught is the true meaning of the word "theory" and how it applies to scientific research.
Re:Why is Creationism bad? (Score:2, Informative)
Creationism teaches that the Bible is the literal Truth, and as such the world was literally created in six days, and it was created about 6,000 years ago. And it gets nuttier from there.
The problem with the Bible, especially the Gospels, is that it offers different, sometimes contradictory tellings of the same story. It's the Rashomon effect. So, if the Bible offers so many contradictions, then how can it be claimed as the One Truth?
Re:Here's a silly thought (Score:3, Informative)
So says YOU, but who are YOU to judge what is and is not germane to MY proof?
Someone who works as a scientist for a living. You may not understand this, but that is how science works. If you make a scientific claim then you must be willing to defend it.
You asked for:
1) data to support ID
Which I offered in the form of the existance of something
How is this *data*? The "existance of something" is now considered *data*?
that according to the second law of thermodynamics, should not exist- the ordering of physical laws at Planck Time during the big bang.
The physical laws that you claim *shouldn't* exist include the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I've included the definition of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics for you to discuss in your next iteration of your *theory*:
"An engine operating in a cycle cannot transform heat into work without
some other effect on its environment _or_ an engine operating in a cycle
cannot transfer heat from a cold reservoir to a hot reservoir without
some other effect on its environment"
For it not to support ID- it's now upon you to show how those physical laws could have come about without an input of information into the closed system of the universe at Planck time.
Item one: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics didn't exist in Plank time so that constraint didn't exist.
Item two: Individuals who posit a claim are the ones who supply the proof. That's how science works.
2) a scientifically defensible definition of 'irreducible complexity'.
To which I offered the example of the physical laws at planck time,
That is not a definition. See the discussion above - that example was offered as your data. You can't interchange one for the other.
for which nobody has been able to offer a grand unified field theory yet that makes sense of why the physical constants of the universe are what they are.
No one has been able to unify gravity with electromagnetic theory - yet. That doesn't mean your theory about ID is supported.
You are attempting to make a positive claim based on the lack of evidence. Are you aware that this is the "God in the Gaps" argument?
It isn't original, you know.
And how does this fact support ID?
The *only* useful difference between ID and evolution is this question- given the same set of physical laws, could species evolve different than they did?
No, the difference between ID and evolution is that something "intelligent" is substituted for random processes. There is no similarity at all.
Evolution claims yes- randomness exists in the universe, and it's possible that a different set of mutations would allow a different species to come into being and become intelligent. ID claims no- that even if we don't fully understand them yet, every little quark anywhere must obey laws set down at Planck Time, and from those laws everything else can be extrapolated.
Your understanding of Planck time is different from everyone else, I'm afraid:
"The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'quantum of length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.
And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m or about 10-20 times the size of a proton.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10-43 seconds."
Now I don't know how you have construed the definition of Planck time into a theory that ev
Yes, they are challenging scientific understanding (Score:5, Informative)
I've posted this before, in one of the threads a few weeks ago, but there was an article in American Scientist [americanscientist.org] about Intelligent Design that looks at the larger picture. A key bit is this:
Evolution is just the beginning, folks. This is about replacing science with religion.Re:Why not big pharma? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh my God! You're right! You just proved evolution is impossible! All of those highly educated professional scientists completly overlooked that!
Oh, and by the way you also just proved that it is impossible snowflakes to form. You know, those for complex highly structured snowflakes that spontaneously form out of chaotic water vapor in the air.
It's unbelievable how scientifically illiterate and ignorant people somehow think they are qwualified to critique the ENTIRE educated professional scientific community that has studied these things and all of the evidence. The attacks on evolution are just as commical as if these people were critiquing nuclear fusion and the explanation of how the sun shines.
By claiming that the second law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution all you have done is proove that you are completely uninformed and unqualified to to competently discuss the subject.
I'm sorry for being so harsh, but after the umpteen-hundreth time of people demonstrating their ignorance and making the same flagrantly INVALID arguments it tends to get a bit tedious and one tends to lose patients. You want to see a bacteria evolve into a fish? And what, I sask you, would you say to someone attacking relativity and demanding "show me my watch slow down when I drive fast in a car". What would you say to someone who argued that conservation of mass proves relativity is wrong because things can't get heavier when they move fast?
There is a REASON ththat 99.9+% of educated professional biologists accept evolution. A REASON that there is absolutely zero scientific controversy over the fundamentals of evolution. These educated professionals understand how it works and they have studied the staggering quantities of conclusive evidence.
You don't need to be a professional and have a biology degree to understand what evolution actually says and how it actually works and to independantly review the staggering quantities of conclusive evidence supporting evolution, but you do need the proper extensive education to be able to competently argue these scientists are wrong on anything in particular... much less to make the rather bold claim that THE ENTIRE EDUCATED PROFESSIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY is completely wrong about everything.
What would you say to someone with no physics degree who attempted to claim that quantum mechanics was wrong? Who attempted to claim that the entire scientific community was competely wrong about quantum mechanics.
I can only assume your highschool provided a dismal or nonexistant education in evolution and all of the evidence behind it. Hardly supprising, it seems many highschools are failing to provide a proper education i the area because of the public controversy and religious controversy over evolution (as I said there is zero scientific controversy over the fundamentals of evolution). Get a decent science textbook and discover for yourself why evolution is not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, the same reason snowflakes are not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
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Re:when will you eventually understand? (Score:2, Informative)
The voice of sanity... unfortunately there are so many (even on this forum) who call it *fact*, which is pretty close to calling it "the absolute truth", isn't it? I don't choose magic for explanation. I don't hang on the word "theory". I want true, scientific explanations. But my skeptical mind have problems accepting something as fact as long as it is not proven. That reminds me of many "facts" from the history and highly scientific discussions on "the mechanisms, which caused that the Sun at some point started to revolve around the Earth".
Re:Evolution is Theory After All (Score:2, Informative)
Evolution doesn't make species faster, stronger, smarter etc. Evolution is about adapting to your environment. Evolution could also make a species become slower, less intelligent and weaker; anything that helps a species thrive in it's environment. It's not even implausible to imagine a species evolving back to single-celled organisms, though this would take a insanely long time, and would need the environment to gradually shift to favoring single-celled organisms.
Domestication is not evolution. We have domesticated cattle, not caused a genetic mutation that makes them different from previous generations. Close and distant relatives of the domesticated cow continue to survive in the wild, human intervention or not. Buffalo roamed the plains of North America for millenia before humans with no problems.
Breeding is a form of evolution, but much faster, because of active evolutionary pressure instead of passive (unwanted genetic variations are destroyed instead of just having a tougher time surviving). Not sure why you think buffaloes prove that domesticated cattle hasn't evolved, they're two separate species?
For me personally though, the best evidence of evolution is my cat from a decade back. It had a very short tail, and small tufts of hair at the tips of its ears. I'm guessing it had a normally dormant gene from an ancestor cats share with the Lynx [wikipedia.org].
China (Score:3, Informative)
I assume what you mean by 'society' is not an ethnic group but a kind of recognisable contiguous social formation."
Chinese society, while not neccesarily having survived 4000 years (evidence of the Xia Dynasty is only present from Zhou era writings - physical evidence remains elusive), does have a solid foundation of ~3000 years. The Zhou dynasty from late 10th century BC heavily influences modern Chinese society, and is considered by many to be the defining character of China. The basis of much modern Chinese philosophy/thought began with the Confucian set of ethics written during the subsequent Warring States period. While the cycle of dynastic rise/fall and foreign invasions did have a great deal of impact on Chinese culture, the Chinese of today do not consider themselves a seperate people from those that lived in the Zhou, which is enough for me to consider it as one society. One example of this is the classic, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," which was writtenmuch later about the Warring States period (~5th century); the contents of the book continue to play heavily in modern Chinese diplomacy and thinking.
Re:Why not big pharma? (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct. 2nd Law of of Thermo says that in an isolated system, delta S increases. Note, it does not say that in all cases, delta S increases. Locally, delta S can decrease as long as for the whole system, it increases. It is this fundamental fact that allows things like air conditioners to exist, babies to grow into adults, and evolution to occur. All three of these examples rely on energy to enter the system and some of that engergy to be lost in the form of work. In the case of air conditioners that energy is electricity, in the case of babies growing up to being adults that energy was stored in food, in the case of evolution that energy comes directly from the sun.
Welcome to thermodynamics.