Egnor drops the ID charade

Egnor's public tempter tantrum is absolutely hilarious. (ERV has a funny summary about it) It's fun to watch the whole ID movement self-destruct - failing to gain a foothold in either science or the classroom, it has devolved into nothing more substantial than petty, whinny tirades against those evil "Darwinists".

Egnor's rant is no exception, foaming at the mouth about scientists' refusal to hold a conference at a state whose legislature passed an "academic freedom" bill to introduce "supplemental material" into classrooms and encourage teaching "the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories" such as evolution and global warming. Sound familiar? It's the old Teach-the-Controversy tactic (ironically, when creation science was taught in Louisiana, the creationists considered that academic freedom as well). Creationists aren't especially good at coming up with new ideas, only disguising their outright attacks on science education, and even then they're fairly inept - the motivation for singling out evolution for "critical" analysis is obvious and the rank and file membership is notorious for being unable to keep the "Intelligent Designer" anonymous.

So imagine my surprise when Egnor dropped the charade of religion-neutral ID and threatened to unleash the fury of the creationist hordes, stopping just short of threatening, "our arrows will blot out the sun". Not the ID hordes or the academic freedom hordes. Nope. The creationist hordes. The big C-word.

But you misunderstand the people for whom you clearly have such disdain. Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life.

There are a lot of big organizations out there who don’t exactly like you. The National Association of Evangelicals represents 40,000,000 people and represents 40,000 churches.

He goes on and on about how "God-fearing Americans" despise the attacks on their faith and are fed up with darwinism/atheism. The stupidity is cringe-worthy, but the honesty is refreshing.

Finally, we see the true face of Intelligent Design, Christian creationists who not only deny evolution, but are also enraged at the mere mention of Charles Darwin and evolution in schools. They are determined to inject their religious views into the classroom and blot out the theory of evolution in a misguided crusade to safeguard their faith. They don't have a scientific leg to stand on, but they're not interested in science, they're interested only in cultural dominion. If it involves censoring actual science and teaching children factually wrong information, then so be it. And if it involves lying to the press and the public about their motivations, then so be it. But there's one place where they're always honest about what they believe - church.

Darwin Day craziness

Intellectual fallout from Darwin Day. Enjoy.

First up, Egnor (a professional IDiot, and one of the dimmest of the bunch) whines about how people objected to his Darwin Day smear piece. The first line is "Why I don't believe in atheism's creation myth". It's not terribly surprising that someone would object to such drivel.

The rest of it is typical creationist talking points: evolution is poorly supported dogma (and conveniently, never trying to support that claim beyond the mere assertion), he humorously states that he figured out the flaws in evolution by reading creationist tracts (garbage in, garbage out), arguments from incredulity, etc. He finishes off his masterful defense of his idiotic editorial by derisively calling it "Happy Atheist Day". Real classy.

Second, a letter to the editor with the breakthrough announcement that "evolution theory is flawed science". ORLY.

His reasoning: we don't have strong AIs yet - specifically, a computer that can contemplate its own existence. Gotta love the creationist tendency to grab anything not relevant to evolution to attack evolution. Perhaps it's because the relevant fields clearly show that evolution occurs.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: he says evolution is atheism. I'm sensing a theme here.

Third, and this is more of an unintentionally hilarious comment than outright idiocy:

In India, Darwin is not the bogey man as he is in the West. The Indic tradition which accommodates both atheism as well as a well-stocked pantheon of 33 million gods (including a monkey god) should have little problem playing host to evolution.

I know it's supposed to highlight India's religious diversity as a barrier to the religious dogmatism that provides breeding grounds for creationism, but I can't help seeing it as an admission that India hosts such a panoply of odd beliefs that evolution doesn't even attract notice.

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. All across the world, people are celebrating Darwin's work, which helped figure out the single most important idea in biology and arguably, all of science.

And boy, are the creationists pissed. For being such persecuted and voiceless souls, they seem to have little trouble getting the media at their beck and call, broadcasting their disdain of evil darwinism.

A common theme seems to be pointing at the Freedom from Religion Foundation's "Praise Darwin" billboard (which by the way, I didn't like for just this reason) and implying that atheists really do worship Darwin as a god. Seriously.

First up, Wingnut Daily's endless screed against evil, atheistic science. For a news organization (ha!) that declared the world to be 6,000 years old, it's little surprise that their article is a festering pile of rubbish.

Next, the DI people (who believe in a designer God space alien beingamajig who created species that then may have/may not have/didn't evolve) went to town - Luskin, Casey, and Wells are working overtime, hitting up Forbes, the Washington Post, and the U.S. News and World Report with sneer pieces.

I don't have enough time (or vodka) to cover them all, but here's a little taste of the vapidity:

The present controversy over evolution is often portrayed as the latest battle in a centuries-old war between science and religion. According to this stereotype, Darwin's theory was a milestone in scientific progress, based on evidence that is now overwhelming, and its principal opponents were--and still are--religious fundamentalists committed to a literal interpretation of Genesis chronology.

Yep, the Discovery Institute, authors of the Wedge Document, which states that their goals are to "reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions" and to "affirm the reality of God" say that their opposition to evolution has nothing to do with God at all. Uh huh.

Friendly Atheist has news on Ohio celebrations that have caught the ire of local creationists.

And in a shocking reversal of their usual stance, Fox News has a decent piece up asking what Darwin would make of all this hubbub, 150 years after he went public with the idea. The writer thinks he would be thrilled at all the progress that has been made in the field, but disappointed at the ongoing denialism. Aren't we all.

Questions that "darwinism" can't answer

Via Brisbane Times

If it's any indication of the quality of the editorial, its title is a play on the creationist propaganda techniques of the same name, a vapid series of "stumper" questions which usually utterly fail to grasp basic concepts in not only biology, but science itself ("if humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?!" or "how did nothing explode?!") or are outright lies miscategorized as questions ("how did millions of life forms evolve with absolutely no evidence of major change?") and are somehow meant to "demolish" the theory of evolution.

For some strange reason, they're only a hit with fellow creationists. To non-creationists, it's like attempting to demolish a physics professor's "faith" in gravity by retorting, "Oh yeah! Then how come birds fly?!". Full of win, it is not.

Evolutionary theory does not explain everything we want to know about the natural world or human life, and some of what evolutionary theory purports to explain it hardly elucidates at all.

Okay, what's the problem?

*skips lengthy, irrelevant God-talk*

Conway has argued evolution is not arbitrary and if life were to evolve again, it would look very much as it does now.

The physicist Freeman Dyson said: "The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture … the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming."

These lines of reasoning do not prove God's existence

Apparently, the evolution of complex, intelligent life --> God. Massive non-sequitur spotted.

Okay, enough God stuff, where are the flaws in the theory of evolution that you mentioned earlier?

The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

*wades hip-deep in even more irrelevant God-talk*

*finishes the article*

The flaws in evolution? Personal dislike of atheism. That's it.

"I find the materialist atheism of some rational sceptics harder to accept than theistic belief, and cannot make sense of my life in this world without believing in God and providence. Crudely naturalistic science leaves no room for poetic truth, refuses to honour any spiritual element in physical things and cannot accept the existence of a human soul."

Well, who wrote this? Surely someone with some sort of biology qualifications. Nope, just some theologian denigrating evolution on religious grounds and pretending that these objections are based in science without ever backing it up.

If we lowered the bar any farther, it'd scrape the floor.

**UPDATE**

PZ covered the same editorial this morning, check it out.

Breaking news: evolution, theism compatible

Via the Columbus Dispatch

The debate between creationism and Darwin's evolution theories often pits religious leaders against scientists. But many pastors find the two ideas compatible -- and are speaking out about it.

More than 11,800 Christian clergy members in every state have joined the Clergy Letter Project, a campaign started with a letter in 2004 to explain that harmony can exist between religion and science.

It is commendable that Christians are standing up for science. Indeed, they may have one more motivation for defending against creationism than atheists do - creationists preach a theme-park version of natural history as biblical fact that is so silly, so embarrassing, so monumentally untrue that it hurts the public image of Christianity by mere association. Non-creationist Christians are obliged to counter such nonsense as much for God's sake as science's sake.

There's an excellent quote by Augustine of Hippo on this matter:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."

"Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

Faith leaders supporting evolution is not new, said Michael Zimmerman, a dean and biology professor at Butler University and founder of the Clergy Letter Project. Some of Darwin's most vocal supporters were faith leaders, he said.

In fact, shortly after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the Anglican clergymen of Essays and Reviews gave it a glowing review, praising "Mr Darwin's masterly volume" that "must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature." Completely coincidentally, those seven were called "The Seven Against Christ" and two of them were slapped with heresy charges and lost their jobs, culminating in Samuel "my grandfather wasn't a monkey" Wilberforce getting a synodical condemnation of Essays and Reviews from the Convocation of Canterbury.

Of course, we're far removed from such blatant intolerance today. That's why in Dover, non-creationist Intelligent Design Christians were merely harassed and condemned as atheists and threatened with hell and not burned at the stake as heretics.

It's little surprise that non-creationist Christians are wary of the repercussions of such zealots achieving political domination of our country's educational institutions.

The Rev. Paul Hamilton of Westerville Bible Church said that creation and evolution are completely incompatible. Hamilton adheres to the narrative of creation described in the book of Genesis.

Darwin had a bias against God, Hamilton said. He feels a mix of pity and disgust for clergy members who say the two theories can coexist.

See? Nothing but Christian love.

Additionally, he supplies the incredibly convincing argument that Darwin was wrong about evolution because he didn't believe in God. (Nobody tell him about atoms!)

Actually, Darwin didn't stop believing in God until well after his voyage on the Beagle. Prior to the voyage, Darwin had been well educated in theology, greatly admired Paley's Natural Theology, and was most definitely a self-professed Christian. Heh, bias indeed.

For him, creation and evolution are mysteries, and humans can't presume to know for sure.

And unlike creation, evolution isn't quite so mysterious as it once was, as new discoveries inevitably lead to a greater and more detailed understanding of evolution.

Despite their efforts, all the zealous dismissal of evolution in the world can't turn back the clock and make creationism viable. Nor will vile slander of fellow Christians intimidate them from making a stand for science.

Replicator ecosystem created in the lab

Via Wired

It's not life (which by definition, is composed of cells), but it certainly evokes the word.

Basically, researchers created RNA enzymes with the potential to replicate with each other. Then, they added nucleic bases to the mix and the enzymes started replicating, producing more enzymes than were initially there. From there, evolution took hold and three mutant strains ended up dominating the population which were better at replicating than the initial population.

Good ol' impossible evolution in action, and an excellent experiment providing insight into early life.

I wonder where the creationists are in times like these.

Evolution is Awesome

Hat tip to PZ

Quite possibly one of the coolest commercials I've ever seen:

What good is half a bike?

Kudos to Panda's Thumb and Carl Zimmer for bringing the pwn.

Casey Luskin, one of DI's last remaining Quixotesque crusaders for Creationism Truth, embarrassed himself recently with yet another botched analogy for Goddidit:

“Bicycles have two wheels. Unicycles, having only one wheel, are missing an obvious component found on bicycles. Does this imply that you can remove one wheel from a bicycle and it will still function? Of course not. Try removing a wheel from a bike and you’ll quickly see that it requires two wheels to function. The fact that a unicycle lacks certain components of a bicycle does not mean that the bicycle is therefore not irreducibly complex.”

Actually, bicycles can and do still function after a wheel is removed. It's called a unicycle.

This comes of the heels of a long line of botched analogies, most notably Behe's insistence that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex, just like a mouse trap.

Actually, it turns out that if you take away most of the parts of the flagellum it's still functional as a type 3 secretory system.



And if you're really want to blow ID out of the water, you can get E. coli to evolve novel flagella. Guess a designer isn't really so necessary, after all.

Even the infamous mousetrap analogy itself fails miserably:



And if you look at the evolution "debate" closely, it's interesting to observe the rank-and-file creationists talking about evolution as if it were merely the addition of new, fully-formed parts, and that if you rewind the clock, you get organisms without the vital tools needed for survival. After all, what use is half a wing or half an eye or half a flagellum? That's essentially the argument of the Discovery Institute's argument, rebranded creationist arguments from ignorance.

It's hard to comment on exactly how wrong this line of reasoning is. It's like arguing with someone who seriously thinks that the Spore creature creator is how evolution actually works - that organisms are simply bestowed new parts as they go along and presto changeo, your eyeless fish suddenly has complex eyes. Similarly, with a wave of his magic wand, the Christian God Intelligent Designer has given previously-immobile bacteria the gift of the bacterial flagellum. Magic sure is neat!

But that's not really how evolution works at all. New features do come into fruition on occasion, but not out of thin air. And parts used for one function can find a new function (case in point: hands) The key concept in evolution is variation: finch beaks with slightly different lengths, primate skulls with slightly different dimensions, etc. A nearly endless variety of forms off just a few basic parts. That's how evolution really works.

And try as they might, creationists can't explain the diversity of life with magic. It simply fails as a science.

Bush: Bible not literally true

In a stunning change of pace, George W. Bush said something reasonably intelligent. Two things, actually:

• The Bible is "probably not" literally true.
• Evolution is compatible with belief in God.

Granted, he's still sticking to his pro creationism cdesign proponentist intelligent design stance, but I suppose even this meager admission is a tremendous leap forward for a presidency drenched in dino-riding Christian fundamentalism.

You're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president.

Right. Good call, not wanting to speak about things you feel you may not have enough knowledge or expertise to be comfortable addressing. Best to leave this sort of stuff to the experts.

One question: where was this humility when you said that schools should teach ID?

I think that God created the Earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty

Yay, God of the Gaps.

I'm curious, what specific part of the history of the Earth is so mysterious that it needs a deity? Was it when the Earth first formed? The very first replicator? The first eukaryotic cell? The first chordate? The first primate? Answer the question and you will find scientific data detailing its formation due to purely naturalistic processes. Suddenly, it's a little less mysterious and the God of the Gaps evaporates.

I wonder how the religious right, particularly the creationists/IDiots, are going to take this. Even Bush, a president not widely known for his intellectual prowess, dismisses biblical literalism. That has got to hurt.

"Evolution is complete"

It's not news, it's telegraph.co.uk. And it's a doozy.

The intro is just a tad odd - opining about the good old days and how the human race is in decline, apparently on "social, moral, and biological levels". They might have well just thrown in this quote:

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common, Children no longer obey their parents. Every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world evidently is approaching." - Assyrian tablet circa 2800 BCE"

Really, declining on a biological level? Seriously?

They help make the case with a basic overview of the theory of evolution. Well, a brief but passable explanation, and a couple terrible jokes. And then finally, cutting to the chase:

"As a result, the rate of mutation goes up many times for old fathers compared to young ones. To forecast its future we need to know only how many elderly fathers there will be.

That figure is, in the West, in decline. Today's men start late, but stop early. In Cameroon, almost half the fathers are over 50, in Pakistan about a fifth, and in France only about one in twenty. Young dads mean that the rate of mutation is going down rather than up, and less, not more, of evolution's raw material is being made."

Okay, I'm no geneticist, but I think I see a couple problems here.

#1 - Complaining about young fathers putting the brakes on evolution makes NO sense for the obvious reason that for most of human history, humans have had babies very, very early. We're not talking Bristol Palin early (17), we're talking Mercy ministries early (11), ages so young that it's just barely physically possible.

#2 - I'm not sure where they got the statistics about younger fathers. It wasn't too long ago that they ran an article on increasing numbers of 40+ fathers: "The number of over-40s giving birth in Britain each year has doubled in the past decade to 16,000."

#3 - There's a very good reason why men don't often reproduce late in life: there's a pretty nasty risk of birth defects involved. Mutations may fuel evolution, but they also fuel Down syndrome.

From there, the article drifts into the tedious ancestral histories, eventually getting to an actual point in that modern technology and lifestyles have greatly reduced darwinian pressures and therefore evolution. In that, I agree. I mean, it's not like my neighborhood is hunter/gatherer tribe toughing out drought with a fair amount of man-eating beasts roaming the area. But still, it's far from "complete". Sexual selection, for example, is still going strong.

But the thing that kills me about this question is that whenever people talk about where human evolution is headed, they either imagine X-Men-like superhumans or becoming the prey of giant crows or humanity splitting into utterly ridiculous subspecies.

It's incredibly silly.

Okay, here's what I think will happen (at least on the Nature side of things): you might see a nifty little trick or two (lactose tolerance, sickle-cell anemia, AIDS resistance, increased blood oxygenation at very high altitudes, etc) but nothing earth-shatteringly different. And then we go extinct. The end.

Richard Dawkins on Darwin

Here's my review of the program:

Part 1

I thought Dawkins did an excellent job explaining both the significance of evolution and the life of Darwin.

Evolution is a remarkable theory because it explains the tremendous variety of life on Earth as a step-by-step process of accumulated genetic change. From this relatively simple process, you get every species that has ever existed on Earth. It can't be overstated how amazing a discovery that was.

But, I do have one eensey weensey gripe: he could have been a little more diplomatic about evolution and atheism. There was this aggressive "evolution disproves your God" streak throughout - he says, "this book [Origin of Species] made it possible no longer to feel the necessity of believing in anything supernatural". This was particularly jarring during his talks with the students. Granted, of course, the students defense of their religious beliefs were absolutely abysmal (and thankfully, later said they were more interested learning about evolution).

But rather than get in people's faces about religion, it would be more productive simply to describe how evolution works and how well-supported it is, and then describe the religious objections to evolution and how one's beliefs don't change the reality of an evolving world. Instead of getting dragged into theological debate, the focus should be on the scientific facts. People are fairly astute and will figure out on their own that there isn't much future for beliefs that oppose facts.

Personally, I don't espouse much of a connection between atheism and evolution, since I was never indoctrinated against it in my theistic youth as a United Methodist. So, in my opinion, evolution is about as innately god-discrediting as atomism or heliocentrism. (I note that interestingly enough, all 3 of them angered religious authorities) While it does set the stage for theists who believe in creationism to for a nasty brush with reality, theists who accept evolution remain unaffected. It doesn't remove "the necessity of believing in anything supernatural" for them.

Part 2

He talks about the "dark side" of evolution - the fact that nature is a disturbing, violent place and that the process of evolution in nature involves a great deal of danger and inevitably, death. And the implications of evolution for us humans - why we exhibit altruism and the realization that humans are apes in the taxonomic sense (our connection to the animal world that's routinely denied in favor of a preferred "special" status).

His talk with the reverend was hilarious, quickly dispatching creationist-style talking points: "why are chimps still around?" and "what's the goal of evolution?". I liked Dawkins' retort that there is no real goal to evolution. It's ironic that religious people try either to denounce evolution as evil or try to deify it as some Victorian ladder of progress when in actually, our shifting genes are no more purposeful than our shifting continental plates. And thinking about it, our genetic code (filled with such undesirables as pseudogenes and ERVs) is a pretty silly place to go looking for teleology in the first place.

He then discusses social darwinism and eugenics - evolution used to justify cutthroat business practices and racism. A very good part on sexual selection, altruism, and his selfish gene idea, which prompted some discussion from a friend of mine.

He wondered why individuals of many species, including our own, sometimes adopt the young of other species even though it does nothing for our own selfish genes. For example, when people see an abandoned deer fawn that's unlikely to survive in the wild, they're likely to take it in and feed it as if it were one of our own. My guess is that it's a byproduct of our paternal instincts towards our young; we're liable to treat the young of other species as if they were our own on occasion.

My friend grimaced at that explanation and insisted that it was unsatisfactory because we can obviously tell that a deer fawn is not a human baby.

I replied that we have some survival instincts which are definitely rooted in evolution, like fear of spiders and snakes. When we see a large snake nearby, we instinctively recoil in fear. But we equally fear rubber snakes and harmless animals that look like snakes. I think a similar thing happens with our love of young animals (and incidentally, ones that are more related to us are more likely to be adopted - adopted animals tend to be almost exclusively mammals; it seems that few people are very sympathetic towards young worms or insects). We "know" that the object of our altruism isn't our own species, but our instincts (and the genes behind them) don't seem to care.

Part 3

Finally, the good stuff - the crusade against evolution in all its nutty glory. I love the expression on his face while patiently dealing with the idiots (vigorous blinking is definitely his tell).

Then it goes through his deconversion story, which I thought was rather strange, since my own experience was so totally different, dealing with poorly supported claims of knowledge of the supernatural (i.e. "because the Bible says so") rather than the argument of design.

Nutbag #1 - the "you can't see evolution" guy (who presumably spends the rest of his time arguing with weathermen that seasonal changes don't happen because no one witnesses the exact instant that summer turns into autumn). Dawkins at least gave him a handshake and parted amicably, which was far more diplomatic than I would have been in his place.

The part where he reads out his barely literate hate-mails (including the cuss words) was absolutely priceless.

Nutbag #2 - "teach the controversy" lady. Such a viper. She pleads for evidence, but she's already ruled ahead of time that there isn't any; so nothing's ever going to convince her - all while arguing that Dawkins is the closed minded one. What a waste.

Nutbag #3 - the chemistry teacher who uses his position to spread creationist material to the kiddies. Claims that "scientists weren't there" and that God's Word trumps all.

Darkins talks about the various imperfections inherent in our species - blind spot, appendix, wisdom teeth, etc. My personal favorite in that vein is our vestigial nictating membrane, that little pink fold in the corner of our eyes. Sure, it doesn't actually harm us in any way, but it's such an obvious leftover from a previous age that it's impossible to claim that man was created from scratch. It's like having a portable cd-player powered by a car adapter sitting on top of the disused tape deck - you can tell it's jury-rigged like crazy.

Dawkins asked the salient question of how we should deal with conflicts of religion and science in schools. My opinion (and sadly, it's probably the minority view) is for educators to unabashedly teach the facts and if students can't handle that due to religious brainwashing, well that's too bad - one shouldn't shy away from teaching knowledge or whitewash it simply because some people don't like it. That's their problem, not the teacher's.

In his discussion with the teachers about this issue, the teachers shy away from overtly challenging creationist views (which is understandable given the fury of zealous parents), but at least they support making the scientific case for evolution. Dawkins caught one of them in an interesting slip of the tongue. He said that evolution is "one way of interpreting" and that "we believe it because we're scientists" unintentionally reinforcing creationist ideas that creationism and evolution are only a matter of opinion and that scientists believe evolution on faith.

Deny - Attack - Absorb: a excellent summary of religious strategies in dealing with conflicts with science.

Finally, Dawkins summaries the epiphanies of evolution: that all life on Earth is related and that we are evolved to survive. In my view, it also means that the earliest life has ceaselessly spread from something you could hold in a thimble to covering the entire Earth; from a few simple cells to an unimaginable variety of forms. Life itself is an unbroken chain of chemical reactions constantly occurring for billions of years. That's ridiculously cool.

Evolution Survey

Michael Shermer is conducting an evolution survey. Let's hope that it gets good, informative responses. *fingers crossed*

I'm guessing it will since it's an online questionnaire, so internet users opt-in to the poll (rather than calling up random people) and it's open-ended rather than multiple choice (just like his How We Believe questionnaire).

Still, his bad responses (which are subject to Poe's Law) are bound to be hilarious/horrid. Hopefully though, on this one, crocoduck won't rear his ugly head.

Evolution 101

Among popular misconceptions of scientific theories, evolution is by far the worst. It astounds me how horribly evolution is framed in popular culture and how maligned it is in public discourse. It is no doubt a result of the Christian-Republican campaign to stifle the teaching of evolution and inject religious dogma straight into the science classroom.

Firstly, among creationists it's abundantly clear that few (if any) of them even understand the scientific theory in the first place. I can't count how many times they have considered "proof" of evolution to be a cat giving birth to a dog or an individual chimpanzee spontaneously metamorphosing into a human overnight. The ignorance is baffling, but unsurprising - these people have been told that evolution is a direct threat to God, so it makes sense to manufacture such self-deceits in a misguided attempt to protect their beliefs.

Not once do they hit on the remarkably simple real idea - that evolution is simply accumulated genetic change from one generation to another. Instead, they attack a strawman of their own devising in an attempt to justify their beliefs.


The process of evolution, pulled from an actual "creation science for kids"-type site.

[Editor's note: finally tracked down the site, it's from our good friend Harun Yahya/Adna Oktar]

Straight-line evolution


Like the horribly bad starfish-->fish example, people sometimes think of evolution as a one-way ticket, with a single species "improving" up to a radically different form. The seductive thing about this misconception is that it's partially true - you can trace a current species lineage from its more humble ancestors, but that's only part of the picture. In reality, speciation involves lots of daughter species and many extinctions. It's a messy affair. And the notion of "progress" in evolution is mistaken - fitness is all about surviving in the current environment, and adaptions always have their disadvantages. Examples in nature abound - pangolins have forelimbs so well adjusted to digging that they're no longer very good for walking, leaving pangolins with a hobbling gait. Also, every once and a while, a species seems to "devolve" and go against our vaunted notions of progress - for example, cave fish that no longer have functioning eyes.

Clade-skipping



Also like the starfish example, creationists seem to think that evolution operates by species launching from their branch in the nested hierarchy to another branch - what was once an echinoderm is now a full-fledged chordate! Sorry, it doesn't work that way; species form a nested hierarchy and continue to evolve, but a mammal species is never going to become a bird species, no matter how much time elapses, their common ancestors have long ago diverged from each other, never to reunite. If they did, that would pose serious problems for the theory of evolution.

Common objections to evolution:

But it's just a theory!

That's true, it is a theory. Heliocentrism is also a theory. Scientific theories are models used to explain facts and scientific laws are mathematical relationships. There's no hierarchy of accuracy - theories don't graduate to law status, no matter how well supported they are by the evidence.

It's morally wrong



A favorite tactic amongst creationists is to throw out irrelevancies - changing the topic from whether or not evolution happens to whether or not evolution is "bad". It's an absurd ploy - no matter how distasteful the facts are, they don't stop existing merely because one doesn't like them - I can't close my eyes and make the world disappear.

It's atheistic



This is the mother lode of objections. I love it because it betrays the motivations of the speaker so well - the main gripe against evolution isn't on factual grounds at all, but on theological grounds.

Well, it's true that the theory of evolution doesn't have much to do with God. Neither does any other scientific theory. Science itself is agnostic on the subject.

But the intent of this objection is to label evolution an "atheistic science" and therefore make it anathema to all theists.

Once again, it's an irrelevant objection - evolution either happens or it doesn't, theological quandaries need not apply.