PZ Myers finds a funny case of creationists misunderstanding some paleobiological science, and does a good job of explaining the creationists’ mistake. What’s funny to me, though, is that they are (once again) cheering for their misunderstanding of someone else’s results. If the creationists are so smart*, why aren’t they producing results themselves?
In other words, we find them cheering because the opposing team has the ball so far from the goal line. However, they don’t understand the rules well enough, or they would realize that the opposing team is supposed to be downfield when they’re kicking off (and neither does their audience, unfortunately). But, to top it all off, the opposing team is playing a scrimmage game against itself, because they didn’t have enough players to field a team, so the cheerleaders only get to cheer when they misunderstand the game somewhat.
To belabor the analogy… (I’m sorry, I can’t help myself) the fans in the creationist stands also don’t seem to understand the game… so even though one of the science scrimmage teams is always winning, they think the creationists are winning because they can only judge by the wonderful cheering coming from the creationist cheerleaders.
*it never ceases to amaze me that creationist ranks are full of engineers and mathematicians and of non-scientists, with very few who have any training or experience in relevant fields – yet they are all so smart that, without understanding the subject, they have been able to conclude that those who do understand it have gotten it all wrong. And that’s just those who have enough academic credentials to make it into the creationism industry… it amazes me more that those whose only qualification for evaluating the theory is a body of articles they have self-selected from the internet are also much smarter than the self-deluded fools who have studied the subject first hand for decades.
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html
“Tulips, seahorses and Manhatten. Exactly what you would expect to form if you leave a large cloud of helium gas unattended for a long period of time”
Still one of my all time favorite snarks about evolution. (From the peerless Fred Reed)
And thanks jadarm. I think it is important that it be noted that it is possible to be a scientist and believe in God or at least the concept of God.
Science has a father. His name was Alchemy. And have you ever heard a son speak so harshly of his father?
I have no problem at all with science or scientists, evolution or evolutionists.
I just don’t believe that we are ever going to get anywhere by pointing and laughing.
If all of this is just one big cosmic accident it is still a wonderful accident to behold. You have to stand in awe of chance.
I find it understandable but rather irritating that so few people are willing to think about or discuss evolution the same way they do other matters of natural study.
Nobody responds to a story about the anti-vaccine pseudoscience with a link to an apologist about God.
Nobody discusses scientific or popular opinion controversies about climate using words like, “well, it is plausible to believe in God”. And, there’s absolutely no reason that evolution cannot be discussed on its merits scientifically without us getting sidetracked by questions about whether it implies anything about God, and if so what. Why not save that discussion for another time, when we’re discussing religion or philosophy?
it never ceases to amaze me that creationist ranks are full of engineers and mathematicians and of non-scientists
Speaking as an engineer who thinks God is the creator, it could be because people who are smart look at a capitalist society & determine the best avenue to, ahem, capitalize. Engineers make more money than math professors or scientists. Being a scientist (or doctor or professor or businessman or salesman) doesn’t mean your “smarter”, it means you took a different path in your education & career.
Narrowing the field of ‘acceptable’ sources to college scientists (gosh, guess which ideology they cater to? Why, left-wing liberalism and larger government funding! What are the chances of that?) can leave one with the prospect of having a group of people so discredited that they have to rename and remake the entire premise of their decades-long advocacy. I type, of course, of global warming, which recently became “climate change” when, you know, it stopped warming. Not that I’m saying to rebuff scientists. I’m saying that, just like your college professor, unless they have a scientific FACT as their summary or solution, they’re just as full of crap as anyone else.
Not a bit less, or more. Just as full.
No need to get irritated.
I have never seen a discussion on evolution that did not eventually wind up a pissing contest between believers and the skeptics.
I do not believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old. But I also cannot make myself believe that everything around me is just meaningless chaos that looks good only because it is all I can see or have ever seen.
It makes sense to me that intent would drive evolution.
Well, you know with climate change contrarian scientists, they are at least fielding a team – if it is short a man or two, and they aren’t making any yardage. It isn’t all cheerleaders cheering at all the wrong times. And, though some of the public discussion of this is handicapped by unwillingness to discuss politics independently from scientific questions, this isn’t nearly as bad a situation as the one concerning evolution, where you cannot even discuss whether birds evolved from dinosaurs or from some other basal clade of reptiles without being drowned out by a chorus of religion-based discussion.
But… since you threw the bait out there – how do you figure global warming has “stopped?” What is it about 2 years of data that tell you that a one hundred year old trend has stopped?
As an exercise, try this, and please be aware that it is *only* an analogy and exercise. Graph the equation f(x)=x+2*sin(x). (for those who would like some on-line help)
Would it be improper based on the logic you are using to conclude that for any delta x > 5, delta y is positive? In other words, substituting t=time for x, and T=temperature for y, that over all but small changes in time, temperature increases?
Would it be proper based on the logic you are using to conclude by looking at this graph from x=-10 to x=4 that at x=2, “y stopped increasing”?
But… since you threw the bait out there – how do you figure global warming has “stopped?” What is it about 2 years of data that tell you that a one hundred year old trend has stopped?
Clue #1 was when the proponents renamed the cause “climate change” after the data went against their (decades long and heavily hyped) projections. Remember, buddy, we’re now less than 8 years from Al Gore’s point-of-no-return.
Clue #2 was my long-term memory cells that recalled what they said was going to be happening at this moment. It isn’t happening.
I could be wrong. I’m not as adamant about my thoughts on the matter as those who – at this very moment being shown to be wrong in theirs – are.
I have never seen a discussion on evolution that did not eventually wind up a pissing contest between believers and the skeptics.
Maybe noted creationist Barack Obama can lead the way to bringing the country together on this issue, as well. Lord knows he’ll be the one who’ll escape scrutiny.
RW… about that other thing.
Here we have a situation where someone in the mail room at your work is jealous of your big paycheck and rugged good looks. He isn’t an engineer, but he took a drafting class in high school and he can read some of your diagrams. He finds a “mistake” in your work, and refuses to listen when you try to teach him enough background to help him see how the error is his rather than yours.
He thinks he is so much smarter than you that his drafting experience is all he needs to confidently throw your designs out the window.
When you point out that this is kind of stupid and arrogant of him, he responds by saying that it doesn’t matter what you say because you are an engineer, and you have a financial interest in the subject. As a matter of fact, your pro-industry bias is enough to discredit engineers as a class to the point that no one should listen to them.
That’s pretty dumb isn’t it?
Are you being serious? Here’s what I got:
-Original source no longer available, quoted in numerous secondary sources, one of which is here.
If you’re serious, whaddayou got? And bear in mind that being a Christian or believing that God created life doesn’t mean that you are a creationist. Creationists deny the science of evolution and believe God created life.
Buck, if you believe that God, in some mystical way undetectable to science, arranged for evolution to produce what it has, that’s just basic theistic evolution, embraced by such luminaries as Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins. Nobody has a problem with that (except the people at Answers in Genesis, who will call you a “quisling” for accepting it.
If you believe that God tinkered with the process so that instead of producing what it “naturally” would, it produced something else instead, then that is “Guided evolution” – and the problem with it is that we should be able to detect that by looking for ways that real-world evolution differs from what natural mechanisms will produce, and yet we never find that. So, scientists don’t embrace this view (though most understand the need for non-scientists to accommodate the science to their intuitions and/or religious viewpoints).
If you deny that there is a universal common ancestor for the living things on earth, then you are being misled. And I, personally don’t have a problem with you for being misled, but I do have a problem with the people that are misleading you.
“Believing that God created life doesn’t mean that you are a creationist.”
Ah, okay. My mistake. I thought that believing in a creator made one swing in the direction of crationism. That sure explains some of the antithetical attitudes towards “creationists”.
So, let me get this straight (none confrontational tone): I believe that God created the universe. I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and he rose from the dead after enduring a horrific death for my benefit. I believe that life mutates and evolves and that evolution is most certainly a fact. I’m not sold on the idea that an amoeba came from the ocean & (skip to the end) me, a few monkeys and apes are all kindred cousins from the same great(exponentiall) grandpappy, but neither do I think that God never created dinosaurs because they’re not in the bible.
What does that make me? I believe God created life. Thus, I believe in a single creator. I also believe that evolution – the act of things evolving – is most certainly a fact & anyone arguing against it is akin to the 9/11-was-an-inside-job crowd (you have no idea how many people embrace that, by the way). Does that make me a creationist? An evolutionist?
I thought believing that God was the creator, by definition, made you a creationist. Maybe I’m still behind the times. After all, I never did get the rap thing over the Rat Pack.
he responds by saying that it doesn’t matter what you say because you are an engineer, and you have a financial interest in the subject. As a matter of fact, your pro-industry bias is enough to discredit engineers as a class to the point that no one should listen to them.
I recall reading a similar argument made against people who disagreed with some of Al Gore’s global warming claims. As a matter of fact, I recall reading it here.
RW, please refer to my post directed to Buck, above. That should clarify. Generally “believer” is an adequate moniker for describing the beliefs of someone about God being the Creator without comment on their views about science.
“Creationism” is a truncation of the original term “Scientific Creationism” which was created as a flattering self-description for those who use pseudo-scientific reasoning to claim that evolutionary science – as a field – is terribly wrong about the vast majority of their viewpoints.
Based on what you said, then you seem to fit in that last category that I mentioned to Buck. Even the “leading lights” of the creationist movement accept that organisms evolve. They deny that it can evolve as much as it has done, and that common ancestry is the rule on this planet.
If you’d care to extend the analogy to cover that case… then we still have the mail room guys criticizing your designs. However, there are also some engineers who criticize your designs and it turns out they are the ones who pointed out the criticisms to the mail room guy. There are actually 30 engineers who criticize your designs – and every one of them works for a company that competes directly with yours. Yet engineers at other companies, not in competition with you, engineers at your own company (whose reputation may rest on the quality of your design), and engineering professors at all the local universities – a total of about 1,000 engineers you have consulted – think your designs are just great.
Now when you point this out to the mail room guy, what is the proper way for mail room guy to respond?
I think maybe I see God as our universal common ancestor.
As for the guy in the mail room, he needs to stick to sorting the mail
Buck… in that case God would be sexless, single celled, and would probably be a chemoautotroph. I can think of no organism more worthy of worship.
“sexless, single celled, and would probably be a chemoautotroph”
And yet everything that is came from that.
Still no answer as to where that came from though.
And that is what interests me the most.
And I know you have already poo-pooed the idea of panspermia.
Occam’s razor makes panspermia less attractive than the alternative – that the first chemical auto-replicators leading to life on earth began on earth. If life “floated” here or was seeded by “aliens”, then that means it evolved elsewhere first – so then you have the same initial problem of how a chemical self-replicator came to life plus the extra problem of how it came to be on Earth.
If God were sexless, then I doubt that the concept of two sexes being necessary to create new life would be the preferable method. I mean, if you’re sexless, why in the world would you create something with boobs?
And if God didn’t want us to procreate, why’d he put all those nerve endings in our naughty regions?
You’re right. I don’t think God & his Wife were sexless.
And, if he wanted us to procreate why did he make all those regions where we have all those nerve endings naughty?
and… if a bear… oh never mind that’s not me.
As a person who believes that God created the heavens and the earth, I have trouble understanding why anyone considers this a game. Often I hear “gotcha” type remarks. A ‘game’ implies competition and winners and losers.
What I believe or disbelieve about creation will not change how life began or how it continues in any way. Neither will any scientific findings or teachings.
If creationists are right, nothing can change that – nothing. The same could be said of evolutionists.
It would make much more sense to seek truth. Truth will stand when everything else crumbles. No amount of bickering or rivalry will change the truth.
That was an analogy. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
I consider it investigation into nature. I understand others understand it as a religiously motivated second-guessing of others’ investigations into nature, made out to be “scientific” but lacking any careful methods of investigation of their own. You can see how people who care about understanding how things go in the natural world could be put off by people who don’t care at all about that, but pretend to know better since it makes them feel better about their religious stances.
And it’s obvious that when people have their religious prejudices on their sleeves and others are very concerned with nature that the discussions between them could become less than productive and could include a lot of “gotcha” type remarks, since scientific types aren’t very interested in anti-scientific religious viewpoints and religious types aren’t very interested in science unless it says what they want it to say.