I always say, “Science works.”
That is all.
Watch this paleoanthropologist answer a creationist's question about evolution being "just a theory"
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ScienceWorks is actually the name of a children’s Science Museum in Ashland OR.
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Awesome!
I apologize for saying you w/o attributing you. You rock.
Go, you!
Someone should have sent her this link so she could educate herself.
ETA - seriously, for the average layman, videos like this do a great job of explaining why evolution is true.
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If it’s not a devil’s-advocate type question, it throws some doubt on Berkeley’s supposedly selective admissions criteria. I mean, this isn’t the University of Phoenix or Bob Jones here.
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Well. . . he never answered her actual question: “why should we base the validity of our life on a theory?”
The obvious reply is “this is a biology lecture, not philosophy, and biology doesn’t address validity.”
Of course I would have been a lot more snarky and said “why should we base the validity of our life on an ancient superstition?”
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I get the impression tht this isn’t just a run-of-the-mill BIO101 course lecture. It seems to be a guest lecture, or something similar, that was probably open to anyone who wanted to come along. Which, if true, likely meant there were plenty of folks who had no need or reason to understand the subtle nuanced difference between scientific theory, and they way that the word theory is generally bandied about in daily life.
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Theory, meet myth.
… May the truthier meme win.
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[quote=“Indubitably, post:21, topic:70890, full:true”]
I always say, “Science works.”
That is all.[/quote]
ahem
That’s “Science. It works works, bitches.”
edit: bonus!
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If you get the high-framerate .uty from YouTube you see he just stops leaning back but then pedals so he isn’t then leaning in, but then puts blown-glass artwork on his teeth, then thinks better of it and swaps in a Cherry switch, but then just goes with nose reckoning.
Hey, that’s cartilage.
So there is no such thing as .uty format, but…it was only going to be the wrapper for calling ‘science labor’ that cranks out current empirical demonstration following the last one by 5 years or more a ‘breakthrough.’ Handy!
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I considered it but her manner after asking the question tells me she had no interest in what he had to say.
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Many scientist believe in a god. Many of the best schools and hospitals were advanced by religious organizations. Evolutionist pit science against religion and it’s a false argument and a distraction. The questions is about evolution as the origin of the species. Not natural selection, which contributes to change and is surely a fact, no doubt. But natural selection is not evolution. Could have contributed to it, but being a contributor means that is not what we’re talking about. Rich diversity allows for natural selection and comes first. How does the one single organism advance by natural selection? The reason many say it’s not a fact is, unlike most scientific theories, it violates too many actual scientific theories. It’s ok to challenge the origin of the species, it’s the scientific way. As the man said Darwin got a lot of things wrong.
OK, so it seems that you accept natural selection can cause changes in a population of organisms.
So think of it this way: if different groups of identical organisms are subjected to different environmental factors for a long enough span of generations, they will eventually become so differently adapted that they are effectively two different species. Repeat the process a few trillion times and you have “the origin of species.”
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tl;dr: natural selection is definitely one driver of speciation.
To give a concrete example, imagine a single celled organism, living several million (or billion) years ago. It lives in the ocean, and all individuals are exactly the same. But, hang on - the ocean isn’t exactly the same everywhere. In some places the salt content is higher, or where rivers wash in the sea water is almost fresh water. Some places are nutrient rich, others are nutrient poor. Some areas are rich in particular kinds of nutrient, because of the kinds of rocks and dirt that the rivers flow across before reaching the ocean, other areas display the nutrient effects of nearby volcanism. So, because our colony of single celled organism is constantly reproducing and being pushed around by the ocean currents, it is exposed to a wide variety of environments and naturally enough over generations it evolves. But it doesn’t evolve in one direction, it evolves in multiple directions at the same time. Some groups become optimised for fresh water, some become optimised for high sulphur area, others really like the taste of granite wash, some like salt, and some don’t like salt, some like the warmth of the tropics, some favour the cool of the arctic. And so on. And various combinations of all those things. Within not too many generations, the fresh water colony is so optimised for it’s particular environment that it can no longer survive if it should happen to find itself swept into a high salt area. The cells that grow around volcanoes ‘forget’ how to process granite wash, so if some of them end up drifting away from their normal home around a hydrothermal vent they’ll starve, or at best grow and reproduce very slowly.
So now our ‘identical’ single celled organism is no longer identical. Is it even the same species of organism anymore? Well, some of them are, sure. But all the others that have optimised for different environments, are they the same thing? No, they aren’t. And from there it only gets more complex - some of them find themselves in dark caves, and never bother evolving light sensitivity or - eventually - eyes. Some of the ones who like to hang out in fresh water find that by living in the mud they hardly ever get washed out into that horrible salty stuff, and evolve ways of clinging to the mud … and eventually find they like it so much they move out of the water completely. Meanwhile, the ones which stay in the water find that if they can wriggle about - even a little bit - then they can control their own destiny a little bit, and make the effort to stay in their preferred habitat. And the more they can wriggle and control the wriggle (fins!), the more they can stay put, or move to colonise equally favourable locations, or follow their preferred temperature throughout the summer/winter cycle. And so on.
Note: I used ‘like’ above as shorthand for ‘are able to reproduce relatively prolifically due to an abundance of food and/or an abundance of space and/or a lack of competition for those resources and/or a lack of predators.’
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the energy for the 1 kg to get into low Earth orbit is 3.29 x 107 Joules(source)
For an 80 kg person, energy cost of [the Muslim standard] daily prayers was about 80 calories a day(source)
→ ~100 days praying burns enough energy to lift one kg of mass into LEO 
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If you can build us a wish powered rocket i will be most impressed
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She probably doesn’t. She was hoping for something like the story that gets passed around where the student destroys the professor by showing that that God exists:
There’s no clap slow enough.
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But they are inextricably linked. This is like saying “the budget deficit and the debt are two different things”-- yes, of course, but one leads to the other.
Depends what you mean by “advance”, speciation is not necessarily an “advance”-- the different species of finch on the Galapagos that evolved from one species are not necessarily “more advanced” than the original, they just found a different niche to fill (and that is also an answer to how the diversity of life comes about.)
Yeah? Which ones? (and if you say “the laws of thermodynamics”, a common answer, you are wrong.)
Sure, it’s OK to question evolution, but asking questions is about finding answers, and a lot of the questions that come from religious circles aren’t about legitimate query, they’re about attacking science to defend religious faith, and often show a profound and willful ignorance of the actual science involved.
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