Public acceptance of evolution

[mbamike]

A novel attempt to square the circle but utter poppycock.

I am not asking you to accept my belief. I am just stating it. Please don't be disrespectful!

 

[Kurn]

The accepting or the retarding?

But personally, there are as many scientific proofs against evolution as there is supporting it. The only thing we're waiting is the Missing Link and voila, everything is illuminated

Call me indecisive, but I bend toward where the science goes

I'm sorry, teman, but there are no scientific proofs against evolution, only various logical counter-offensives. You may be anxious to state something about God's involvement: He threw out the first pitch and that's how the world got started. To say anything else would mean that omnipotent God needs to fix the game along the way.

Understand nature and your mind will grow up and we will be less childish. We owe it to our ancestors to cut out the kenak-kenak stuff.

 

[gsdx]

Onslow: "Scientists say that we share 99% of our genes with chimpanzees."

Daisy: "So?"

Onslow: "So why do I wake up craving a fag and not a banana?"

 

[Passels]

Ok, then Cool! How about this: What breed are we? Homoerectus? J/K, just having some fun here. The teacher was teaching Evolution as Fact instead of Theory, but later, he was required to teach creationism as a unit in his class. I wasn't very Religious back then.

You do realize that scientists use the term 'scientific theory' in a way different from popular conceptions, right? Evolution isn't going to become 'fact' down the road just because we acquire a larger body of evidence.

It speaks volumes when intelligent design proponents insist on calling evolution 'just a theory' without realizing what 'theory' might entail.

 

[diamondstar]

This topic really gives one a false sense of security. I bet that list has fallen greatly from 2005 til now.

 

[sabot3ur]

"So why do I wake up craving a fag and not a banana?"

 

[jayxx2]

i'm glad i was brought up in school (yes a Catholic one) that taught logic. i always thought that this clip was pretty good at summing up how religious people can totally accept evolution.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAM-1FbxFXc[/ame]

hope it works.

 

[wooffy]

What I find disturbing is sentiments like "For me personally, evolution is just a theory."

First of all, let's clear up the definition of "theory." And "just a theory."

People talk about evolution being "just a theory" when they mean to say "Your guess is as good as mine."

Actually, when people talk about anything as "just a theory", they are confused as the the colloquial usage and the scientific usage.

In colloquial (everyday) use, a "theory" is just an idea, what a scientist might call a hypothesis.

In scientific terms, a theory is a systematic explanation of the some part of the natural world. It is more complex than a "law", and thus subject to revisions, tweaking, or minor points of disagreement - but on the whole is supported by evidence and has been thoroughly examined.

So, when a person dismisses the Theory of Evolution as "just a theory", they are really making an admission of their own ignorance - twice over.

 

[MercuryJones]

I still cannot get myself to believe that we evolved from Apes

This might make it easier: We're still apes. There are chimps, gorillas, orangutans and us.

 

[opinterph]

This topic really gives one a false sense of security. I bet that list has fallen greatly from 2005 til now.

In what appears to be a separate study published in 2006 by The Richard Dawkins Foundation, data combined from 1985 to 2005 suggests that in the United States:

• The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent.

• The percentage overtly rejecting evolution also declined, from 48 to 39 percent.

• And the percentage of adults who were unsure increased, from 7 to 21 percent.

See also: U.S. Lags Behind Europe, Japan in Acceptance of Evolution

 

[zoltanspawn]

Mikey, I think you'd enjoy some of the YouTube videos available featuring Father George Coyne, a Vatican astronomer that Jayxx2 linked just upthread. He's a smart guy and speaks fluently on the intersection of his personal Catholic beliefs and mainstream science. He mentions, by the way, in the video Jayxx2 posted that John Paul 2 stated he didn't view evolution as merely hypothetical.

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

ya cans beleive ins a anything untils a dead

da price folk fa eons pay fa bunch of turds make death ans misery fa others so theys cans be da ( YEAH IT TRUE kiss ma BUTT )

evolution 2010 0 fa da crap think a theys any brain their butt

thankyou

Hey fairys!!!!!!!!!! YO!!!!!!!

- evolutions many countrys folk alls talk ta computers ans suck recycle cheese dead eons ago ans da worms takes a overs da planet YEAH!

add on > public no got accept nothin ya is free spirits ya knows fa thems what go fa populations stuck in yokes ofs a others twats

when civilization start da fairys throw honey party! kissy kiss

 

[cityboy-stl]

I would say that "Let there be light!" is as good a description of the Big Bang as any in science. To that extent I believe in creation. I also believe that evolution means growth and that we, among others, are the natural development of that initial spark of creation. Advancement, growth, change, development are both creation and the goal of it. I really do not think the two can be separated or are even remotely at odds.

If you want to get religious about it I can see the creation of the spirit as a singular event where at some point God created and fused the natural body with the created spirit to make us the unique beings that we are.

 

[SLOPPYSECONDS]

got love human cultures theys a so ups theirs waggos

wheat sit arounds waitin fa MAN ta invent god ans sudden wheat da bread of Man cause Man says so
" what bread? "
somethin ya country sellin ya folks down da drain fa
" ooh ours great educates bless their great bookshelfs "
Paper humans go figure!

if alls planet life ear plugs theys wear um Yeah!

how walk down nice street withs outs get alls da folks horny go ta these countrys ans theys give ya sack ta wear HA

if ya no see this post ya not here!

 

[unloadonme]

I am not asking you to accept my belief. I am just stating it. Please don't be disrespectful!

Believe me, I almost wrote something a lot worse. If you'd posted in the Religion, Spirituality & Philosophy forum, what you say would be fair enough. But in HT? Come on!

By the way, in the light of feedback received, I withdraw "novel".

 

[opinterph]

I believe in God, but as someone with an engineering background, I also believe in science. I do not believe that creationism and evolution are mutually exclusive.

God is omnipotent. He spoke and the elements obeyed. Evolution is the label science has placed on the process of the elements obeying God's command to continuously improve. Creationism tells us what happened; evolution tells us how it happened.

God is omniscience and we were made in his image. Man today is unevolved compared to man in the future. They will look back on us as we look back on the Neanderthals. This is because of the inertia of the elements obeying God's initial command to improve.

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

 

[randomfreak]

To clear up a few things for the naysayers (I'm looking at you, freefall =P):

1. We cannot prove a theory, only disprove it. A scientific theory by definition must be falsifiable; once there is counter-evidence, by the laws of inductive logic, the theory goes in the trash bin. However, as long as we have tried very hard to disprove the theory to no avail, the theory is assumed to be true. Now, because many theories about the same thing can be true at once, we only mount evidence to judge which theory is the most probable. Rather than looking for "proof" that evolution is true, we must look for proof that evolution is false. So far we have not found a fossil that is in the wrong era, even though scientists have looked hard.

2. There is no "missing link." Evolution is all about small, incremental changes. Imagine the number line. To make it more concrete, let's talk about, say the length of a horse. Imagine that at timepoint A we find the horse to be 2m long, and at timepoint B to be 4m long. Do you scream "but you can't say that the horse grew longer, because for the horse to become 4m long, it must've been 3m long first. Because we have not found a horse that's 3m long, your theory cannot be true!" And then imagine if we DO find a horse that's 3m long between timepoints A and B. People will scream again "but to get to 3m long, the horse needs to be 2.5m long first! Show me the 2.5m horse or else you're just making things up!"

See how farking ridiculous the concept of a "missing link" is?



The basic "proof" for natural selection is the experiment with the guppies. I forgot the name of the person who did this, but the experiment has been replicated several times with consistent results. Natural selection happens.

As for "proof" of evolution:

There is a very interesting experiment done by Lenski, in which he cultivates his own E. coli samples and separates them into many generations (we're talking in the tens or hundreds of thousands here). He found that with each successive generation, the bacteria get better at digesting food. Another observation by accident is that the bacteria gained the ability to digest citric acid somewhere along the line. This was previously unheard of for this species. Sure, the bacteria did not grow an arm or a leg, but this is the equivalent of you suddenly being able to digest cellulose.

P.S. gsdx, we cannot even "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. The word proof is so tricky in terms of logic... Deduction is proof, but induction is not proof. It's black swan logic. The sun rising every day, like most of our observations of the universe, is inductive logic.

 

[CUMMINGS]

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biology professor at Oxford, was on Real Time with Bill Maher last week.

They spoke on, of course, evolution, but also God, Atheism, the Bible, Nazism, North Korea, and Islamic schools - glad to see they stayed away from controversial topics.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72bGSyphJiE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72bGSyphJiE[/ame]

 

[teadrinker]

Actually, when people talk about anything as "just a theory", they are confused as the the colloquial usage and the scientific usage.

In colloquial (everyday) use, a "theory" is just an idea, what a scientist might call a hypothesis.

In scientific terms, a theory is a systematic explanation of the some part of the natural world. It is more complex than a "law", and thus subject to revisions, tweaking, or minor points of disagreement - but on the whole is supported by evidence and has been thoroughly examined.

So, when a person dismisses the Theory of Evolution as "just a theory", they are really making an admission of their own ignorance - twice over.

\

Thank you, Wooffy - that was just what I was going to say, but far less eloquently than you!

-T.

 

[wooffy]

Thank you, Wooffy - that was just what I was going to say, but far less eloquently than you!

-T.

I have my good days. I also have all the other days.

Thanks.