There are no 'major' flaws, despite what Cobb County will tell you. The only 'flaws' are in people's ignorance and misunderstanding of it. There isn't any 'uncertainty' about evolution in the scientific community. The scientific discussion over evolution is not about whether it occurs, it does, it is about how it occurs and the relative significance of different models. Evolution is such a beautiful concept, and has had such a massive impact on biology. Without evolution, there pretty much wouldn't be biology, or medicine, or the study of ancient natural history. Without evolution, we'd still be letting blood to cure diseases. Evolution is fact.

The other area of misunderstanding is over the word 'theory'. There's some odd misconception that there's this hierarchy of uncertainty, ranging from 'guess' to 'fact' with 'theory' somewhere inbetween. That really is.. very wrong. You observe something, and you come up with a variety of different ways to explain it. If you've observed one piece of evidence, you'll probably have loads of ways to explain it. You'll have lots of theories. You'll observe something else, some other evidence, and you'll probably rule out quite a few of them. You'll still have numerous theories left. Third piece of evidence, fourth, fifth, you'll narrow down the options, each time getting closer to the truth.
With evolution, there are millions of independent pieces of evidence that support it. A fact is a theory that is proven beyond reasonable doubt, and there is no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that evolution is fact. There simply isn't any other theory that will explain that huge amount of data.

And 'Creationism', or 'Intelligent Design' as it's dressed up, isn't even a theory.

Any specific problems you'll have about 'evolution' will undoubtedly be due to your ignorance on evolutionary biology. I don't mean that as an insult or anything, evolutionary biology is a huge field of research and you shouldn't expect to know everything. I invite you to post any specific problems, and I'm fairly sure I'll be able to address them, bearing in mind we've probably already covered the vast majority of them on the multitude of different evolution threads. I would like to settle this once and for all, you posting all your problems, one at a time, and letting us put them to rest.

[url]www.talkorigins.org[/url]

Well, shouldn't this all be easy to understand since biology supposedly doesn't require much intelligence?

I don't have too much of a problem with the theories revolving around evolution. Just that it seems to me that there are things that are still unprovable so I just tend to keep an open mind with regards to it all.

I don't really have any specific questions or concerns though.

It's the opposite of unprovable - it has been proved...

Yes, but when you state scientific propositions, when you state facts and laws of nature, you are using language, and language is the expression of CONCEPTS through sounds. So you're not really describing reality itself. So we're back to square one.

Can't you see? You are using language!

*'splodes*

Things that are 'unprovable' aren't science to begin with.

You know what I mean. I hope. Things that are still unproven and are, therefore, currently unprovable.

the ultimate irony is that evolution is so beautiful and clever that it could very well inspire belief in a divine beginning to the universe.

Actually, molecular/genetic evidence is the primary source of evolution evidence we have right now. The theory of heritance and DNA has only been proposed years after Darwin/Wallace came up with evolution theory (a very early version), and genetics is fully compatible (and indispensable) with evolution.

Evolution contradicting genetics or vice versa seems like the good ol traditional mass demention called 'creationism'. Maybe it's the 'mutation has never been shown to increase information' spiel. Whatever it is, the fact that it's still around even after - what's the word - barbarically falsified indicates very well what kind of people we're dealing with. Intellectual honesty and knowledge are somewhere below on their agenda.



The theory of life forming (abiogenesis) stands alone from evolution. Evolution is fact independently of abiogenesis.

Second, not only have we theoretical knowledge of biochemistry that 'life' can evolve out of 'non-life', we actually observed this process of life forming (synthesis of molecules) in a lab environment. Still lots of things have to be tested, but the fact is that 'life' can arise through natural, chemical processes out of 'non-life'. There is no such thing as a special spark of life, it's all chemistry. (note that the life <-> non-life is a fairly arbitrary distinction)



If a bit wasteful and violent :/

But I agree. You can learn about it on very basic levels, and then go really deep to look at the underlying processes. What you see there is ****ing awesome

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's landfish' job

and this is not my batman glass

What?

'Unprovable' and 'unproven' are two completely different things.
The existance of other Universes is unprovable. You're not going to prove that. ever. It's the realm of philosophy, not science. Important, interesting: yes. Science: no.
The existance of additional moons around Jupiter, more than the 63 we already know of, is currently unproven. Are there more? Possibly, we don't know. Will we be more certain when telescopes get bigger and more accurate? Of course.

You seem to be gearing towards the idea that "Somewhere in the future someone might possibly discover something that disproves evolution, so I'm just hedging my bets for that eventuality!". Which really isn't any sort of argument at all.



Inspires superficial awe at the mathematical beauty of nature, perhaps. But it has no theological significance. God is ultimately not necessary in the process, which is precisely what makes it so beautiful.

Jesus Christ I hate academics.

For someone who talks like a big smart man you sure have some pretty stupid ideas about conservatives. I'm a conservative but I support homosexual equality and I'm anti-life. I'm also a nonpracticing Christian.

On the other hand, you're quite obviously a blowhard from one of our vaunted Post-Secondary Education Institutions, sucking up all of the Good Ideas from your professor with the same indomitable tenacity of a French whore. Kudos, my good man. Kudos. You serve as an example to us all. If everybody were like you society would be a much better place.... although I'm something of a nihilist, so when I say that "society would be a better place" I really mean "everybody would be dead".

Edit - Here's an interesting question for you to ponder with your mighty brain meats: What have you done for society lately? You have 'uneducated', possibly illiterate farmers who work to feed people. You have uneducated oil rig workers who keep your lights on and your car running. Even the till monkey at McDonalds is serving a useful function in society. But what is the average university egghead doing for society?

This is what I don't get. First off, the people who don't go to college are the clear minority, so you aren't a special pretty little flower for attending one. And second, because you learn a plethora of useless garbage in addition to the topics you'll actually apply to a career, you feel like you're somehow qualified - no, entitled - to pontificate to the rest of us about any subject that strikes your fancy. But in the end you just end up coming off like a ranting pseudointellectual.

Hey, let me know when you finish your 8 year study on what makes wet sand sticky, okay? I'm really curious.

Are you gonna bark all day little doggy... or are you gonna read up on what you're attacking? The relationship is a fact, I suggest you deal with it. When a dude finds a correlation of r=-.xx with r statistically significant, and noone attacks his findings on validity, methodology, even not after 18 years after its been proposed - it's probably a fact.

Forget about acting normal. Take this challenge: go to your local neonatology department and find ONE (1) doctor who has worked there for at least TEN (10) years and who is violently opposed to all forms of euthanasia (incuding passive) and abortion. Then find ONE behavioral geneticist, or heck, just a rational person, who thinks homosexuality is a free choice, isolated from and unaffected by all previous experience and nature, and who thinks homosexuals shouldn't be treated like equals.

Enough babble - academics have a tendency towards liberalism exactly because they *know* stuff like this. The people who know nothing about the cause of say homosexuality because of dogma, etc... are more prone to be against it - and the dogmatic tend be less liberal than conservative, no? What side is it that says homosexuality is a sin? The sanctity of life should be preserved under all circumstances?

But I dunno.... academics haven't lived on the street and all.

Pull your head out of a textbook and read what I said:

I'm pro-choice and I believe in equal rights for homosexuality.

Not every conservative is vehemently opposed to euthanasia and not every conservative is homophobic. You're inventing your own little version of reality. I'm not sure why, but I'm pretty sure there's a direct correlation between intelligence and reading comprehension (which is an area you appear to be sadly lacking in).

On the contrary, my good friend. I'm conservative - along with many, many, many other conservative - because the Liberal economic policy is downright bat****. And that's another good question for you: If the Liberals have so many smart people, how come they're so bad with numbers?

No, what I'm saying is that the majority of these people who attack homosexuality because it's an offense to the institute of church are also the ones who lack the knowledge on what it is exactly - and the absolute majority of those people voted conservative. I could've read that wrong, but a lot of people voted B because of these family ethics.

PS: I'm not a mainstream liberal (I'm pretty right economically) - I'm just not conservative.

So pretty much what we're both saying is that the really intelligent people are moderates. :p

Checking in right here.


And that's the problem right there. Academia is so far removed from the real world. They sit in their university labs/lecture halls/dormatories completely isolated from the rest of the real world. The only time they hear of the ills of society is through some (biased) news report. Thus they walk into the lecture hall and go on a tyraid of how the evils of capitalism are ruining the poor or some gobbledygook.

If you've actually lived on the street, experienced the problems of society and still hold a left-ward viewpoint. Fine. I have no problem. You just see things differently than I do. But if you're some tenured professor watching the news reports in an on-campus Starbucks sipping your $5 coffee drink and then preaching on how the rich must pay for all of the poor, I will promptly say "STFU" and go back to your $5 coffee drink.

The poor and uneducated do manual labour, like mining oil, farming crops, working fast food places. That's pretty damn obvious. Whether it's a 'good' or a 'bad' thing is fairly irrelevant, it's the way it is.
But to say that those that don't do manual labour don't contribute to society is also ludicrous. Innovations and inventions fairly obviously contribute to any society, but that isn't really the 'purpose' of academia, it's just a byproduct. Academia does not contribute to the economy, that may indeed be true. Their purpose is not to make goods or provide services, that too may also be true. Academia serves to answer questions. Why? For no reason. Answering questions just for the sake of answering questions.
Einstein is heralded as one of the greatest theoretical physicists, but his ideas haven't had any practical applications whatsoever. But thanks to Einstein, we have come one tiny step further to understanding our Universe, and that is what makes him great. There is more to society than economy, and Academia is that.



Personal experience isn't 'evidence' for anything. At all. You've lived on the streets. So what? Is that supposed to magically make you an expert sociologist, economist and anthropologist all at once? The 'real world' is not the personal experience of one individual. The 'real world' is data. If a University professor is wrong, it's because his data is wrong, or his interpretation of the data is wrong. Not because he hasn't "lived on the streets". You get closer and closer to the 'real world' by looking at more and more data.

Is captalism the ideal form of society and economy? To answer that question you have to look at data, across history, across countries. Not by asking homeless bums.

What about complete wasteland majors like philosophy or mythology? The people who major in Tolkien Literature?

They're completely useless and everybody knows it. They exist solely to teach people and, thus, accomplish nothing but create more teachers for a useless subject. They're all fine and good to learn about. They're quite pleasant topics of conversation, I've found... but doing it professionally? And getting paid to do it? That must be pretty sweet - getting paid to do no work whatsoever. And then, to top it all off, you act like you're the cock of the walk because you live in an ivory tower and lecture the masses on your wacky social theories... yeah, right. That's so constructive.

Hey, it's knowledge. Can't be a bad thing.

On a side note, the inverse relationship between 'conservatism' and 'intelligence' is not the same as 'someone who voted conservative' and 'intelligence'. Conservatism is just non-progressive ethics and social views. Jon, by that definition you're not conservative.

Why stop at philosophy and mythology and English literature? You can extend that argument to everything. Why is philosophy 'useless', while theoretical physics isn't? Or theology? Or mathematics?

The purpose is to answer questions. It doesn't matter what those questions are, or how 'useful' they might appear at the moment.

For philosophy specifically, the biggest part is learning logic. Learning how to construct an argument, and making sure it is logical and sound. If everyone studied this, we'd have far less 'fuzzy logic' and we'd make progress a whole lot quicker.



See, this is the whole 'conservative/liberal' not being the same as 'right-wing/left-wing' causing problems. I knew it'd come up eventually.

As nice as it is to persist in our glorification of the French revolutionaries, the left-wing/right-wing linear scale isn't a terribly sound manner of expressing social, political and economic alignment.

What makes the academia so distanced from reality when from what you've just described they are similar to every other American (...except switch news report with American Idol)?

I chose to leave my flawed wording as it was but I do think there is a semantic difference between currently unprovable and totally unprovable. Be that as it may my original point is still that I believe there are some pretty major building block issues to evolution that remain unproven and mysteries. This really isn't a field I'm too concerned about so I'm not really trying to fuel a big discussion on the topic.



I haven't been arguing. I could really care less if evolution is proven or not. I initially stated something along the lines of my general belief the theory is sound so I'm not sure why you've drawn the above conclusion. I'm also not one of these people that think evolution, creationism, and whatever other theories there are are all mutually exclusive. I personally find evolution, generally, to be highly plausible but I also think it plausible that the things that sparked the very beginnings of life and sentience are divine (and that's coming from a non-religious person).

>:

I'm no conservative, but liberals will have no legitimate claim to being smarter than conservatives until they can understand the term "perjury."

What 'major building block issues'? You can't say that evolution has 'major flaws' and then pass it off lightly.

If you're talking about the origin of living organisms from non-living chemicals, then your problem is less with 'evolution' and more with 'abiogenesis', also known as spontaneous generation. That's a very different issue, more to do with chemistry and primordial conditions than evolutionary biology.

Yeah. Clinton wasn't impeached because he was messing around with an intern. He was impeached because he lied about it under oath.

Ok, a lot of crap is being talked about academics, and it's doing my head in. Ok, so I dont swan about the English or Latin departments here in Durham, but in my department (Engineering) ALL the academics are required to have significant first-hand experience in their respective fields. My lecturers and tutors have worked on battleships on weapons systems, they have worked on oilrigs, they have worked on building sites and in design offices. Furthermore, for the most part, drive cars that aren't as new or as nice as my parents' cars (and they are working class). They are not rich, most are not even that well off. The are ordinary people who happen to achieved a great deal academically, and in their fields, and who are now passing on what they have learned to a younger generation. If it weren't for universities teaching such things who would design your houses? Who would manage your water supplies? Who would perform surgery?

The idea that all academics are bumbling old useless pillocks who contribute nothing to society is a big fat exaggeration, and its proliferation around this debate is nothing short of useless.

Sorry for the rant, but it was driving me nuts.

Also, not all in academia are liberal, just like not all conservatives are stupid.

Ok, so in the UK, most conservative voters are middle class or richer, often 'posh' or those students who are more cut throat about their money. For me, even though I know that eventually I'll be earning quite a bit, I'd rather pay that bit more in taxes and put my money to use for people who can't do as well as me. Obviously I'll be feeding those leeches of the state who can't be arsed, but you know what, I'm happy with that for now.

My point is that in the US, conservative voters are being labelled (as a generalisation) as slack jawed yokels - those in the 'poorest' regions (I'm using the word 'poor' loosely here). In the UK the polar opposite is true, it's the overly educated and high earners that vote conservative (because they feel that they've earned their money and don't want to share it for want of a better generalisation).

I find that odd.

I also think it hasn't been mentioned in this debate, in which I'd've expected this to crop up earlier.

I've tried to stay away from this thread, as what was said in the first two pages had me fuming, but i jsut wanted to add a bit. as far as abiogenesis, scientisits have managed to create amino acids under conditions of the primordial earth in laboratory experiments. Obviously, amino acids /= life, but it does prove that the building blocks were present, given a few million years and a soup of amino acids, things can start to happen.

American conservatives can be generalized in 3 ways:

Those who have worked the system and come out extremely wealthy.

Those who are trying to work the system to come out extremely wealthy.

Those who are conservative because they are xenophobic.

1&2 are usually extremely intelligent and are only annoying because they are so selfish. 3 is annoying because they are usually extremely dimwitted, misinformed, and vote for people because God told them to.

http://www.drinkatwork.com/newcomic.gif

Please don't leech images. -DSettahr

Gotcha.

Is there any particular reason Schming hasn't been banned yet? just wondering.

He's just being silly :p. He's a really nice guy underneath. (i think). But its easy to generalize his three rules or make loose rules to any group , its just best to ignore it.

No one is biting on his falmebait beause we all know he's full of ****. :p

its one thing to make a joke, its easy in a thread like this. but he's done it for the entire thread.