Re: Just who is immoral in the evolution debate?

> From: "bludengutz" <bludeng...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> I believe that we evolved from pond scum is rather bizarre, about as
> bizarre that we came came from a crashed UFO.

That's not worded very well. The words are jumbled up like you really
don't understand how to compose English sentences.

> ..which some people believe and which may be just as hard to PROVE as
> the evolution THEORY.

Only mathematical expressions are proved, and only from premises that
you have to just assume are true in order to do the proof. For example,
if you assume Peano's postulates, plus the ordinary rules of logic, you
can define 2 as the successor of 1, and prove there's only one number
whose successor is 2. But with scientific theories, anything that
actually asserts facts about how the real world operates, the best you
can do is find a mathematical system that seems to match certain
aspects of reality and then tryto find evidence to support or refute
that matching.

The evidence that evolution (change in allele frequencies, within a
population, over time) has been verified with good evidence so very
many times that anyone who denies that it happens would have to be some
kind of idiot. There's a lot more evidence for evolution than for the
claim that you were born. Was I there to see you born? No. Were any of
your friends there to see you born? No. Was your mother's doctor or
midwife there? Maybe yes if he/she is still alive, but did that doctor
or midwife watch you 24/7 through all your growing up years to verify
the baby that was born is the same person as the you who is now
claiming to have been born? Surely not! Not one person has actually
seen you born then watched to make sure the babies weren't switched at
any time between your birth and now. So it's just a theory that you
were born, without much evidence to back it up. Evolution is so well
supported by evidence that it is regarded as a fact. Your own birth
isn't so supported and is not a fact.

The mechanism behind evolution is a theory with less support, but still
more support than your own birth. It seems to be some combination of
mutational mechanisms, together with conception rate much larger than
required to maintain zero population growth, together with some
combination of selection mechanisms whereby grossly unfit fertilized
eggs die before they can even implant, and many foetuses die before
they are born, and many babies die before they can grow up to produce
children of their own. Some of those selection mechanisms have been
solidly proven, while others are still under study.

> I have seen no scientific EVIDENCE that evolution is beyond a doubt a
> TRUE fact.

I agree. Anybody can doubt anything without any valid reason for such
doubt. For example, there are people who doubt the world even exists,
and there are people who doubt even they themselves exist, and there
are people who doubt the Earth is somewhat round, and there are people
who doubt that there's any such thing as gravity that holds things near
ground most of the time and holds planets and moons in their orbits, and
there are people who doubt that substances are composed of chemicals,
and there are people who doubt that chemicals are composed of atoms,
and there are people who doubt that atoms contain a nucleus with positive
charge and electrons with negative charge, and there are people who
doubt that it's possible to know anything whatsoever about the world,
and there are people who doubt that living organisms are composed of
cells, and there are people who doubt that living cells are of two
kinds eukaryotes and prokaryotes, and there are people who doubt that
living cells require food/energy to survive, and there are people who
doubt that DNA in cells carries a message of how the cell will develop
and what kind of organism will arise from such a cell, and there are
people who doubt that allele frequencies ever change in a population.
But none of these kinds of people have any *reasonable* doubt for most
of those facts, including evolution. There's a difference between
doubting something just to be perverse, as you do with evolution, and
actually having reasonable doubt, such as current doubt that there's
life on any other planet in the Solar system, or doubt that any
supernatural being exists or has any power to do "miracles" on Earth.

> It seems to me that if we evolved from pond scum that the process
> would still be continuing.

We didn't evolve from pond scum. Pond scum is mostly algae, which
evolved in parallel with our own evolution, from a common ancestor that
was neither human (nor mammal nor vertebrate nor animal of any kind)
nor any kind of algae (nor any kind of any of the various phyla that
nowadays contain the various kinds of algae).

> What stopped it?

Nothing. Evolution is still going on all around us. Even allele
frequencies in the human population are changing over time as some
people who have resistance to some diseases survive better than others
who don't have such resistance, and as countries in Asia are
reproducing at a faster rate than European/American countries.

> Everything has a purpose

Do you have any evidence, even a shred of evidence, to support such a
wild extravagent claim??

> I do believe in adaptation which is different than evolution.

Are you referring to an individual learning from experience during a
single lifetime? Or are you referring to cultural evolution whereby
children learn from their parents and these teachings are passed down
the generations but they are improved along the way? (That's evolution
in a difference sense of the word, so I would understand if you don't
believe biological evolution occurs but do believe cultural evolution
occurs.)

> The ground squirrils on each side of the grand canyon are the same
> but behave differently because they had to adapt to the change caused
> by the canyon.

Are you claiming that each individual ground squirrel individaully
during a lifetime figured out on hiw/her own what adaption needed to be
done, and did it, consciously and deliberately, which would indeed be
adaption not evolution, that baby ground squirrels on opposite sides of
the canyon are statistically identical to each other, and it's only
after a ground squirrel gets old enough to start figuring out stuff on
his/her own that the behaviour starts to differ?

Or is it possible that *some* of that difference in behaviour is due to
teaching from parents and/or difference in genomes, so that even babies
too young to figure out things on their own might have slightly
different behaviour across the canyon? Do you even admit such a
possibility that the claim you made above might be slightly untrue?

> A true scientist looks at all possibilities and should not accept a
> theory as fact until proven.

You really are perverse! It's impossible to prove anything whatsoever
in reality, so you would request that nobody ever accept anything
whatsoever as a fact, to you there are no facts whatsoever, the word
"fact" is like the word "unicorn", a word with no meaning.

> To expect some one to believe in a unproven cause is ludicrus.

Please tell that to the leaders of the churches, who insist people must
believe their stupid religious ideas, none of which have ever been
proven or even have any decent shred of evidence to support. Tell that
to the warring factions in Ireland and Iraq and India who each believe
what they believe and dismiss the beliefs of their enemies as evil even
though none of them have any evidence to support their beliefs against
their enemies' beliefs.

> Once we accept our beliefs it sometimes becomes so stong that no
> other option would seem plausible.

That's very true. Sometimes people get so wedged in their particular
beliefs that they can't even comprehend the possibility that they might
be mistaken. Ask the Pope for example whether there's a chance Jesus
wasn't the Savior or maybe he didn't even exist as a living being at
the time claimed in the Gospels but was in fact just a general myth
that was put together into a concrete living-being-story about a
hundred years after the alleged time of his life.

Fortunately, for the most part scientists aren't like that. True
Einstein was wedged in the idea that the Universe is deterministic,
that it isn't governed by true random numbers (like rolling dice), and
to his dying day he couldn't shake that belief, so he fell behind his
peers in accepting quantum mechanics as a very good theory to explain
how things work. And even now some aspects of quantum mechanics are
difficult to accept. (And some are really badly explained, making them
harder to accept than if they were understood correctly.) But in the by
and large, when enough evidence presents itself, scientists and most
scientifically-minded laymen change their minds to accept reality,
discarding their childhood beliefs that are now known to be false.

> You cannot claim that creation is a myth when in actuality it is a
> theory.

The basic idea of a theory is that it makes quantative predictions
about the future behaviour of systems whose current state is known. If
the current state is only approximately known, then many theories will
make approximate predictions for a limited time in the future, although
that "limited time" could be millions of years in the case of
predicting the future trajectory of asteroids. (The time depends on the
accuracy: For that asteroid that astronomers thought at first had a
tiny chance of hitting Earth sometime around the year 2025, now we know
its orbit accurately enough to be sure that collision won't happen, but
for the longer term we know it'll stay in an Earth-crossing orbit but
we don't know whether it will or won't actually collide with Earth some
*other* time within the next million years. Our calculations over the
next hundred years are more accurate than our calculations over the
next million years.)

Show me a WebSite that describes any creation theory that makes any
predictions, even statistical predictions, about what will happen in
the next two years, given knowledge of the way things are now.

> One of the "problems" with Christianity is the lack of unity.

An even more serious problem is the lack of any support whatsoever for
more than half of the allegations in the Bible, and the direct
contradiction of Bible with scientific knowledge in many areas forcing
any honest Christian into accepting that the Bible is merely telling
traditional stories rather than revealing facts in those areas, such as
the Flood which would have immensely disrupted a lot of geological
evidence in a way that would have been blatantly obvious in the
geological record if it had ever happened. There was no more Flood than
there was a global thermonuclear war on Earth in 1962 or the end of the
Earth at the end of year 1000 or 2000. So why is there a story about
the Flood in the Bible? Because it was passed down by word of mouth for
generations, and at the time of some actual local flood it seemed like
it's raining all over the world, as in the hit song in 1970 by Brook
Benton. Maybe some grandparent told his/her grandchild that "when I was
a teenager, there was this big rain storm that washed away our town and
killed most of us, and only the few of us that had climbed up to a tall
hill could escape the deluge, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights
except it was so dark we couldn't see when it was day so that figure
might not be exact, and it looked like the same rain was happening
everywhere, not just in this valley", and the child grew up to repeat
approximately the same story to his/her children and grand-children.
But there's no way to really know exactly how that story got started.

> you have a book called the Holy Bible which is supposed the be God`s
> Holy Word ...

Yup. According to some people, it's supposed to be that. According to
the majority of people it's no such thing. It's just a matter of
opinion and belief. There's no evidence to support such a claim.

> homosexuallity ... evolution ... if the church accepts these things
> as being ok and acceptable then they are going against the very
> principles upon which they are founded.

What really is the basic principle upon which the churches were formed,
the belief in a supernatural creator and attempt to best understand
that being, or a dogmatic belief in the literal wording of a
translation of a translation of a scribe-rendering of stories passed
down through the generations verbally as if somehow that final
translation came out 100% accurate despite its gross contradictions
with common knowledge of science and nature and its even more severe
contradictions with technical scientific knowledge that is not yet
common knowledge?

> Another thing that impressed me as a teen was the old TV show
> called Dragnet. The actors main line was "Just the facts ma`am".
> That is all I am seeking, just the facts.

That was a good philosophy. If you ever truly convert to such a
philosophy, rather than just saying you do, that would be good.

> On the other hand I feel it is morally wrong for people within the
> scientific community to push theory as fact.

Hardly anybody in the scientific community ever does that. Those who do
are so rare that you'd do best to attack them specifically and
individually rather than make general statements about the community as
a whole. There's a higher incidence of Catholic priests sexually
molesting children than scientists pushing theory as fact. Sometimes
scientists make mistakes, and sometimes they push their pet theories as
if supported, such as the Cold Fusion fiasco. But most other scientists
withhold opinion until the facts are in, and scientists with the proper
equipment and funding carry out copies and variations of the
experiments and discover Cold Fusion isn't correct, and so then we're
rid of that bogus claim. I have yet to see the Catholic Church take
equally strict measures to eliminate a much more serious problem of
child molestation than any Cold Fusion claim ever was. Cold Fusion
built up false hope, just as most religions do all the time. But child
molestation really hurts people directly, and should never have been
tolerated as it was. Even now it's tolerated to some degree, which IMO
is flat out wrong.
..

----

[The whole use of "it's just a theory" in connection with evolution
flies in the face of the way scientists think. Scientists know that as
we learn more and more, we have to adjust our models. So rather than
theory vs. fact, they think in terms of "models." We have better and
worse models. Until we get the "theory of everything", most models
apply only witin certain limits. But within those limits they can
still be good. So a scientist doesn't ask "is this just a theory?"
They ask "how well does this model fit with the real world? What are
its limits? Has it predicted anything?" Of course it's still just a
model. So in some sense it's not a fact. But no model, even very
well-established ones like Newtonian mechanics (which, I note, is
considered a really good model even though it has known limitations)
is ever considered "fact." The models are attempts to describe and
explain the facts. In this sense creationism is just as much a model
as evolution. It's an attempt to explain why the world is the way it
is. I won't comment on my assessment of it, because this group isn't
an appropriate place to discuss the scientific merits of evolution and
creationism. (The charter doesn't permit it, because I'm not qualified
to moderate the discussion.)

I note in passing that this is true except in mathematics.
Mathematicians use the term "model" in the opposite sense: they
consider the world to be a model of their mathematics.

--clh]

.

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