Humans figured out the Earth was round over 2000 years ago, and some of us are still having trouble with that one.
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Well, there are also truly random forces (like genetic drift) besides just natural selection, but the point is a lot of religious people who claim to believe in evolution still believe that their god(s) are the ones that decide what organisms live or die and not impersonal natural causes. Which matters because if they believe their deities have power, they also probably believe in the power of prayer to influence things – and in general “thoughts and prayers” are a way to avoid doing anything constructive about problems.
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To be fair, it took Darwin several years before he was convinced, and he worked hard at it.
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Darwin didn’t know about genetics* so his attempts to figure out how species changed were all pretty flawed, as can be seen if you compare the dfferent editions of ‘Origin of Species’. It’s like Wegener with continental drift. Both could see what happened, but couldn’t figure out how it happened.
- Ironically, there was a copy of Mendel’s work in Darwin’s library. Unopened.
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And we know that because the pages of Mendel’s work are uncut (in those days you often had to cut the pages as they came from the presses stuck together). But to be fair, Darwin was sent literally thousands of works unsolicited and he couldn’t possibly read them all. How could he know that a paper published in an obscure German-language journal from what is now Czechia would be the one thing he should have read?
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I always felt that this was a super fringe bit of nuttiness that the internet glommed on to, did the “Harambe is the king” routine, and because it got enough exposure, it attracted all the wingnuts that really wanted to belong to something bigger than themselves.
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I know you joke, but I was curious about when and what was the first vaccine to cross the 50% threshold in the USA. I haven’t found that exact information, but just looking at some stats on things like infection rates, the 1940’s and 50’s were when a lot of people got vaccinated. Probably because they knew what the alternative looked like.
As for 50% today, I have some good news and bad news:
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“evolution” just means “gradual change”, so it’s the correct term here.
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Still a lot of interpretation in “God just created humans”. Do they believe God adapted an existing species into modern humans (“instilling in them a Spark of the Divine”, or something along those lines), or do they believe that God created humans entirely from scratch and we just happen to look like bald apes? I can kind of see the appeal of the first idea even though I don’t believe it myself, and it doesn’t really contradict any science.
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I don’t think it is fair to him. Darwin doesn’t know about genetics, but if you actually read On the Origin of Species, you can tell he has some understanding of how inheritance works even if not why. For instance he talks about what we would now call recessive traits:
When a character which has been lost in a breed, reappears after a great number of generations, the most probable hypothesis is, not that the offspring suddenly takes after an ancestor some hundred generations distant, but that in each successive generation there has been a tendency to reproduce the character in question, which at last, under unknown favourable conditions, gains an ascendancy.
Obviously we now know a great deal more than him, and it wouldn’t matter if he completely missed the boat on things like this. But I don’t think he did. I was surprised by clear insights like this and wonder where people think his reasoning was that flawed.
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Okay here I go…
I agree that evolution happened, I agree the earth and the universe is way older than 6,000 years, I agree the universe is bigger than any of us can comprehend. I agree there is proof for all of that.
I can even buy into the whole big bang theory but…
Can anyone explain where the two things that banged into each other came from? For the science people that seems like a tough hurdle to jump and for the religious people, they can claim the big bang was set in motion by God.
But then that brings up a whole other thing, if they believe it was God then where did God come from? They accept God has always been. I might accept that God started the whole ball rolling but then I can’t get past where did God come from. Was there another God that created the current God? I always get stuck on the something from nothing bit.
I saw the white light about nine years ago, had the mother of all heart attacks, all my doctors said I should have died, that little incident keeps me up many nights wondering about what’s next. Some nights it’s oh well, when it’s over it’s over and other nights it’s this can’t be all there is.
I wonder if scientist struggle with that especially since they can only go back so far.
I also have good friends who visit the ark museum and believe it’s a historical accounting of creation. I have to scratch my head at that because one of them has a masters degree in science.
Oh well, only one way to find out for sure and I’m in no hurry to find out.
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This is pretty much true on every damn thing, sadly. Our country is fucked so long as it continues to cater to the loudest know-nothings and the willfully ignorant. Or Republicans, however you choose to phrase it. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
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This is why the “tornado in a junk yard resulting in a 747” stupid argument fails. But all the arguments fail. And then come back again slightly rejiggered. This is why we call them “zombie arguments.” You kill them, and they just keep returning.
@tcg550 (consecutive reply limit requires edit)
Can anyone explain where the two things that banged into each other came from? For the science people that seems like a tough hurdle to jump and for the religious people, they can claim the big bang was set in motion by God.
Interestingly, the Big Bang Theory was initially rejected by scientists as being too religious. AS to where it came from, and what came before, there are many theories (my own favorite is the “collision between multidimensional branes” theory) but there is precious little evidence, or hope for evidence, of any of them. The Great Cold Spot in the CMB map has been proposed as an umbilical cord from such a collision, but that is utterly unproven. Essentially, you rapidly devolve into philosophy and religion when you ask about pre-bang universes.
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I suppose a more realistic argument would be a junkyard where a junkyard monkey randomly puts together two pieces over and over again. And every time two pieces together look like a functioning part of a 747 he puts them aside. Do this over generations and generations and generations and generations of monkeys and eventually you do have something akin to a 747. Or at least something that looks different but can serve the function of a 747.
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I think that the religious explanation, that it was all set into motion by god, is woefully insufficient.
But I don’t think that it is inadequate because the natural next question is, “Well, who set god into motion, then?” I think that the natural next question should be, “If god set it in motion, then how did god go about doing this?” If one cannot explain the mechanism by which god set the universe into motion, then “god” is simply being used as a stand-in to fill the hole where an explanation should be.
It is the same with the whole “intelligent design” thing: “How did god create life in all of its diversity?” If one cannot explain how god did it, then god is simply the absence of an explanation of the mechaisms involved.
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I can totally get onboard with all kinds of theories about aliens or other dimensions or even that we are a tiny universe being observed or played with by some other creature but it still comes back to even those aliens or creatures came from somewhere.
Something from nothing hurts my head.
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I was thinking about the polio vaccine, and how Elvis was credited with potentially helping save millions of lives, because he got the vaccine live on TV. Imagine if Trump had gotten his vaccine publicly instead of in secret (and didn’t tell the press till weeks later). Sadly he’s about the only person that would influence some of these people to actually do it.
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You want “hurts my head?” Try this one on for size: There is a calculation that given sufficient time, a time far greater than the trillions of trillions of years required for the heat death of the universe, there is a non-zero probability (which means it is a certainty) that sufficient virtual particles manifest at the same point in space-time at the same moment to generate a new Big Bang. Literally something-from-nothing, totally allowed by quantum theory, and utterly inconceivable in scope, both in terms of time required and mass involved. Read this one a while back and had to just sit back and consider for a while…
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But that’s not something from nothing as something is already here.
If I buy into there is more to life than what we have right now then that whole eternity thing boggles the mind. Does eternity eventually end? These thoughts were so much easier before I quit the pot and the alcohol.
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