Creationish Vs Evolutionism? BE POLITE!

[RetiredGuns]

Im still hoping for someone who doesnt believe in evolution to explain our neandrathal dna. In the past we succesfully interbreeded with them. They are a seperate branch on our family tree. That proves a common ansestor. It seems to me that facts are unumportant here.

I don't see the big deal? Neanderthals are classified as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They were humans. They made and used tools, performed amputations, buried their dead at grave sites, cooked, made and played instruments & had brains the same size as modern humans. No ape ever carved a 7-note scale flute! So there was inter-breeding, I don't see the big deal.

 

[spraay]

I will take offense to this though as I see this more on the side of religious people. When you ask a scientist about something they show you proof and a good scientist will say "I don't know" if there is none. They may offer a theory but they will say in the end that they don't know for sure. On the contrary, you ask a religious person and they will say that their belief is "The TRUTH" and back it up with nothing. They will even go so far as to go to other countries to bring people to "The TRUTH" as if the beliefs of the people there are somehow inferior. I've even been to church services where the pastor said things about other religions in a condescending tone and got chuckles from the audience. Or the devout people who joke and laugh about other peoples beliefs as if their belief isn't as good as 'ours.' Frankly I don't give a crap what other people believe and generally stay out of it. However, when this arrogant crap springs up I argue the counter point with a hope of bringing some humility to the topic. Usually to no effect. We're all equals on this planet and NONE of our beliefs are above others. I suggest you take your own advice and see the Hubris in your own faith.

I won't take offense, despite your personal insinuations. Since this thread originally seemed to welcome some healthy debate, I was game to engage. But the tone has taken unpleasant turn. I'll take my leave after this post.

I would respectfully suggest that you seem to be contradicting yourself when you say 'none of our beliefs are above others'. You only too enthusiastically point out that science is virtuous (which it often is not), and that faith or religion is just full of arrogance and tyranny. So science is clearly (according to your description) 'better'. I can absolutely agree that religion has been used to great ill, but so has science. I would also submit that much of what we call science today is driven as much by ideology (even an evolutionist in this thread referred to Darwin's 'followers') and money (do you understand the grant process that funds science?) as religion ever has been. I would also agree with you, that a good scientist will admit if something is not known, but I think there is not enough good 'science' going on these days.

I can also agree with you, that anyone with faith believes that it is true and right. Otherwise, what's the point? But true faith (just like real science) is about learning. I would take exception to the notion that I believe that all other faiths are wrong, or that church missions (at least the ones I've been on) are about proselytizing the 'inferior'. I have no doubt that sort of thing has happened, but to imply that I've been party to it is presumptuous on your part, and not particularly polite. If you take me for a backward uneducated person with no understanding of the world and scientific method, you would be mistaken. I considered a career in research, many years ago, but found it too much like a career in politics. I also became acquainted with a few folks, years later, who are life-long researchers, in physics and medicine. They're great folks. And you don't have to talk to them very long to find out that even they admit that there's some real crap being passed off as science, with money as the end.

I would submit that things like genetic engineering, human cloning, and some particularly nasty forms of biological weapons development and other 'science' of this sort is ill-considered, given what is not known (hence the reference to hubris). There is a rush to get to some places in science, which would mean a lot of prestige and money for the victor. I'm not sure the way that we'll get there will serve us best. The notion that science is above reproach and beyond corruption flies in the face of some pretty spectacular failures in this regard. If you find the things that some people laugh about in church to be offensive, I suspect you'll have a real melt-down if we get a pandemic that's caused by a genetically engineered virus (not that I condone mocking anyone's religion). The atom bomb should be an indication of the sort of horror we can devise for ourselves.

What I was attempting to do when I engaged in this thread, was to draw some healthy debate, and offer some observations from what is obviously considered an alternative viewpoint. The ironic bit is that I have a certain enthusiasm and respect for actual science, but what I've found in this discussion so far, is mostly the angry doctrine of anti-religion. That's a shame.

SP

 

[Coad]

Again, ability to interbreed proves a, common ancestor, validates evolution. your flutmaking apes comment holds no ground, and makes is also is incorrect. We are classified as part of the great ape family we make flutes.

 

[Coad]

Also we are the same as neandrathals in the same way that a wolf and a poodle are the same.

 

[Modifier]

Im still hoping for someone who doesnt believe in evolution to explain our neandrathal dna. In the past we succesfully interbreeded with them. They are a seperate branch on our family tree. That proves a common ansestor. It seems to me that facts are unumportant here.

If the new evidence holds any weight, then the popular theory that modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed—and possibly even interbred—for millennia has just been shot down, especially as another hugely accepted theory shows modern humans didn’t settle in the region until 42,000 years ago.
Read this:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112777296/neanderthals-extinct-earlier-than-thought-020413/

 

[liamstrain]

Both science and religion rely on men to one degree or another. In and of themselves, neither one is good or bad - they are tools. Men on the other hand, have issues, and can abuse and misuse any tool. Playing a blame game for which one is worse, doesn't help us deal with the problems men create.

Science research does have one benefit in that we recognize the immediate power it has, and have created ethics boards, and safety protocols, to help guide us through some of the morass. But as with so many things, no system is perfect and accidents and abuses are inevitable. This is not a flaw in science, any more than a minister who abuses his pulpit to preach hate and terror, or a pedophile priest sheltered by his peers is not a flaw in religion. These are flaws in men, not necessarily flaws in the tools they use, and we should keep that in mind.

There are, of course, flaws in the tools too (more of an epistemological nature, for both) - but the usual complaints against one another don't encompass them.

 

[liamstrain]

If the new evidence holds any weight, then the popular theory that modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed—and possibly even interbred—for millennia has just been shot down, especially as another hugely accepted theory shows modern humans didn’t settle in the region until 42,000 years ago.
Read this:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112777296/neanderthals-extinct-earlier-than-thought-020413/

In Iberia. There are still other sites in africa, and a lot of other data to be parsed. Many just think all this does is move back the interaction dates earlier and restrict them to a different region (not the Iberian peninsula where the most famous sites are).

 

[Coad]

Modifer, Even if we prove a seperation of time, and remove my interbreeding statement, for arguments s

 

[Coad]

We are still left with the dna proof. I believe the the othe explination is it was inherited from the common ancestor.

 

[HeavyHanded]

If the new evidence holds any weight, then the popular theory that modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed—and possibly even interbred—for millennia has just been shot down, especially as another hugely accepted theory shows modern humans didn’t settle in the region until 42,000 years ago.
Read this:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112777296/neanderthals-extinct-earlier-than-thought-020413/

True enough, but this also (interbreeding shot down) pushes the date back even further for a common shared ancestor with modern homo sapiens = more evidence for evolution. I'm getting the feeling Adam and Eve didn't look much like a baroque painting...

 

[Esav Benyamin]

The common ancestor was Homo heidelbergensis, Heidelberg Man. If you put a suit on these guys and walked down a city street with them, no one would blink.

One difference between trees in the forest and family trees is that on a family tree, branches diverge but also merge. For a recent example, a group of modern humans known as Cro-Magnons, entered Europe and spread to cover that subcontinent. A related branch went to Asia and ended up as the paleoasiatics at the far end of Siberia. Then the paleoasiatics crossed over to the Americas and soon covered our continents.

Enter Mexican empires and the Aztecs, invaded by European conquistadores. Mexicans are now a mix of European and Amerindian. Had these peoples split a longer time ago, they might have begun to speciate, as H. sapiens and H. neandertalensis seem to -- but not quite. And when the travelers met again, at the fringes of their territories, we find evidence mixed populations.

It is hard to talk about speciation in Homo because anthropologists tend to give each new fossil population a species name, and many of these were actually the same species. That is, they could have easily interbred to raise fertile offspring.

 

[Coad]

When a species seperates, then reconverges at a later date, and has changed dramaticaly, and no longer are the same as the common ancestor they are converging as diff. Sub species. They have evolved. In our modern species it has happened, diff races. But those are very minor differences compared to the neandrithals and us.

 

[sticktodrum]

I didn't look deeply into the thread, but did someone already address the "it's impossible for the eye to have evolved" thing that was on the first page?

 

[liamstrain]

I didn't look deeply into the thread, but did someone already address the "it's impossible for the eye to have evolved" thing that was on the first page?

Yes. The flaws in the argument from irreducible complexity were addressed. Whether minds were changed is another matter.

 

[JCavSD]

This whole back and forth between those that subscribe to evolution and those that believe in creationism/intelligent design is a dead end. One has it's foundation in science and the other has it's foundation in faith based belief. People who aren't enamored with scientific thinking, and feel the need to believe in the supernatural, can do so. Those who aren't interested in developing a sense of spirituality, and think that critical thinking and science hold great value, can do so. Smashing the two together and drawing comparisons always ends up silly.

 

[Raymond1000]

This whole back and forth between those that subscribe to evolution and those that believe in creationism/intelligent design is a dead end. One has it's foundation in science and the other has it's foundation in faith based belief. People who aren't enamored with scientific thinking, and feel the need to believe in the supernatural, can do so. Those who aren't interested in developing a sense of spirituality, and think that critical thinking and science hold great value, can do so. Smashing the two together and drawing comparisons always ends up silly.

Is spirituality incompatible with critical thinking?

As a single counter example, check out Thomas Aquinas.

 

[JCavSD]

Is spirituality incompatible with critical thinking?

As a single counter example, check out Thomas Aquinas.

Not always. Most people readily apply sound critical thinking skills most of the time and suspend those skills under certain conditions. Personally, until I was around 30 I had a huge blind spot in the area of relationships. I had a methodology that was belief/feeling driven and it insured short term success and guaranteed long term failure. Then stuff happened, things were said, realizations were made, and I got over it. Regardless, I was living a fairly well thought out life at that time except for a few areas that were beyond my ability to grasp until I worked up to them. In some areas I'll probably be blind as a bat, and obliviously happy about it, until the day I die.

Thomas Aquinas was a champion of the cosmological argument, and from the perspective of sound critical thinking that's nothing to be proud of.

 

[Raymond1000]

Not always. Most people readily apply sound critical thinking skills most of the time and suspend those skills under certain conditions. Personally, until I was around 30 I had a huge blind spot in the area of relationships. I had a methodology that was belief/feeling driven and it insured short term success and guaranteed long term failure. Then stuff happened, things were said, realizations were made, and I got over it. Regardless, I was living a fairly well thought out life at that time except for a few areas that were beyond my ability to grasp until I worked up to them. In some areas I'll probably be blind as a bat, and obliviously happy about it, until the day I die.

Thomas Aquinas was a champion of the cosmological argument, and from the perspective of sound critical thinking that's nothing to be proud of.

We need to be careful what we are saying here. When it comes to the exercise of logic, jumping to conclusions isn’t a patch on jumping to premises. Pick your premise and you can logically prove anything. Einstein said “Reason has powerful muscles, but no personality.”

Someone can use impeccable logic to reach a conclusion with which you disagree. Your disagreement does not disprove his logic.

If I may steal from The Devil’s Dictionary:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as
quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds;
therefore --

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.

There is nothing wrong with the syllogism.

 

[GWashington1732]

Is spirituality incompatible with critical thinking?

As a single counter example, check out Thomas Aquinas.

No it isn't, and this is the exact problem with evolution discussions. On one hand you have fundamentalist religious people who are threatened by everything new, on the other you have people who claim to be all about science and reason inhaling their own flatulence, in this type of discussion they have no place. I've already said it but it needs to be said again, and again, and again, and again, until people get the point; evolution, all real science, has absolutely nothing, not a thing, not even a little smidgen, to do with religion, they are completely separate entities.

For those extreme religious folks, if you are threatened by a scientific discovery or theory. If your faith is so shaken by something new that doesn't fit with your preconceptions of the world that you completely disregard it, might I suggest that it is you who are questioning your faith. It's really easy to bury your head in the sand and ignore changes, it's a lot harder to face those changes and accept that they are not an assault on you faith in a higher power. They are just new ideas that are being tested and experimented with, and that you can look at these ideas objectively and understand them and even come to accept them without letting them interfere with your religious convictions. It is possible for you to keep your beliefs intact while still accepting new ideas. Biologists are not attacking the religious, on the contrary, we want to help you see that accepting new ideas does not mean that you have to reject your beliefs, they are separate entities and should remain that way forever.

For those methane huffers who have been using the Theory of Evolution as ammunition against religion. Shame on you! You are not acting like scientists, you are not the most rational beings in the universe, and you're not helping. Can it! When you use evolution to attack religion you're giving it the reputation it has as being an assault on people's beliefs when it is not. YOU, not "religious whack jobs", are the reason why people are so uncomfortable with the Theory of Evolution. It is because of you that teaching evolution is attacked in so many schools around the world. If people would stop the high and mighty "science" preaching, people would start to see that new discoveries and advancements of scientific theory are nothing to be threatened by. I want to see religious people, maybe even the extreme fanatics, stop viewing scientific advancements as something to fear, I want to see them realize that scientists are not trying to destroy their religions, and maybe eventually realize that they can accept science while still believing in religion. That is never going to happen with people like you constantly harassing them and making them feel uncomfortable at every turn. And if this seems rude to you, it's because it is. So I'm asking you, please, if you can't discuss evolution without insulting people's religions, please, please, cram a ham in it.

 

[Nixelplix]

I enjoyed this speech by Ken Miller, biology professor at Brown University. For what it's worth, he is a Christian, but speaks about evolution very eloquently:

http://ripr.org/post/i-believe-evolution

I believe in evolution. In America that's a controversial statement. More than half of us reject the theory of evolution, and for some, it's not only wrong, but the source of nearly everything that's wrong with society today. But to a biologist like me evolution isn't politics or sociology. It's a scientific idea. And it might just be the best scientific idea ever.

Darwin's great insight was that the living world today holds the key to our biological past. The fact that he worked in an age before genetics, before the discovery of radioactivity, before the identification of even a single pre-human fossil, makes his work that much more remarkable. Darwin didn't know about the gene, but today we trace the ways in which genes themselves produce evolutionary change. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but today we follow the course of evolution thru our own DNA and the story is unmistakable. Like everything else on this planet, we evolved.

The objections often raised against evolution, like the age of the earth, or their so called gaps in the fossil record, are remarkably easy to answer. And I've done that many times, in books and lectures and twice, even in a federal court. But the evidence isn't what really bothers most Americans about evolution. What bugs them is that evolution says something they just don't want to hear. Namely, that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it, or more accurately, we emerged with it. To them that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, our existence is without purpose, meaning, or value. My concern for those who hold that view, isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology, it's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet, and even this beautiful little state, from the deep forests of Hope Valley to the rich aquatic life of Narragansett Bay.

Understanding that doesn't demean human life, it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.

Here's another quote:

"There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms." -- Encyclopedia Britannica

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/197367/evolution/49850/Molecular-biology