Evolution is the religion of fools.

[matmat]

BTW, do you really care what americans believe Han?, At least half of them think Bush is a good presindent :P, and I keep getting mails that say 36.254% of them believe Korea is in africa, and 17.532%  believe japan is land connected with Texas, and many other rubish.

Well, obviously that is nonsense as everyone knows that it is Iraq that is connected to Texas.

yes! otherwise how would they both have oil?!?!?!?!?

[matmat]

BTW, do you really care what americans believe Han?, At least half of them think Bush is a good presindent :P,

Actually it is only about 1/3 Americans who think Bush is a good president. And only 14% think history will judge Bush as an above average president.

I don't believe in the theory of history! it is wrong!

[matmat]

It depends Mike, I have studied evolution, Mendel and stuff at high school, and I probably got some extra knowledge from documentaries wich I love. But I didn't read any book of those who you (or others) adressed me for a deep research.

 

Now I feel almost forced to tell you about the bible, wich I didn't read, nor probably you, but both of us have a fair idea of what it says. And a very different thing is what others want to tell us it is saying BTW.

 

I think I have a good idea of how evolution works, and I would never reject it since I can hardly get any proof that its wrong, I only reject it as the only possible answer. And I really hope its not the good one.

 

Actually not the only one, evolution is not contradictory with religion, god or anything.

 

I don't care if politicians are scared of the church losing power and want an open 'sacred' war between evolution and religion, they won't fool me with that nonsense.

a few points --

 

an intro college level bio text would do -- no need for in-depth research.

 

if you didn't read the Bible, how can you have an idea of what it says? That is actually a poll i would like to see, but doubt it exists -- what %age of the church going population has actually read the Bible.. I understand that you can have an idea of what someone else thinks that book says, but how, having not read it, can you say that you have an idea of what it actually says?

 

in math and science, lack of proof that something is wrong doesn't make it right. the whole point of evolution and other theories, is that there is a whole lot of proof that it, most likely, to a high degree of certainty, with large probability is correct.

 

let me preface that I am not in the least bit religious, but as far as i understand it, western religion has the flexibility built into it to adjust to the scientific circumstance. (granted it takes a few hundred years for that to happen sometimes, but it generally accepts modern scientific theories and achievement). what does worry me is how unwilling certain religious factions/entities are to modify their thinking.

 

somewhat related anectdote: i once saw a paper on the astronomy preprint server trying to reconcile the days listed in the Bible with the seemingly short 24 hour day we have now. According to the author the length of the day was inversely proportional to the consecutive day number, starting with 1 for the day of the big bang. the current day # is of course very large, so there is very little difference in length between consecutive days, but the first few days were incredibly long, allowing the deity to create lots of things during the first six days

[Elianna]

Now I feel almost forced to tell you about the bible, wich I didn't read, nor probably you, but both of us have a fair idea of what it says. And a very different thing is what others want to tell us it is saying BTW.

You may still be addressing this to Mike, I'm not sure, but I've read the Bible (though we may be talking about different ones).

 

I don't recall it having a lot of proof of creationism.

 

I too would be curious to see a poll of what percentage of different groups have read The Bible (and which version). Like those who attend worship vs. those who don't. Etc.

[Gerben42]

if you didn't read the Bible, how can you have an idea of what it says? That is actually a poll i would like to see, but doubt it exists -- what %age of the church going population has actually read the Bible.. I understand that you can have an idea of what someone else thinks that book says, but how, having not read it, can you say that you have an idea of what it actually says?

 

What does it mean to have read the Bible. Is it bad when I skipped over the endless "and X is the son of Y" list in Genesis?

 

I don't recall it having a lot of proof of creationism.

 

It's something you cannot prove or disprove. As I said before, I cannot disprove that the Earth, BBO and this forum have all been magically created N minutes ago. I can use Occam's razor and dismiss this hypothesis for any value of N, though.

 

For almost all times by common sense, for the very early times in the universe for which we have no physics because I have insufficient information as does anyone else, and the likelyhood of a story in some old dusty book to have anything to do with whatever happened is mind-boggling to me.

[Codo]

(Elianna) I don't recall it having a lot of proof of creationism

 

There are people who studied the bible and came to the conclusion that the living of man started about some 7 or 8.000 years before christ. They simply counted the "son of x and y" numbers together and put some more stuff into it.

 

So the proofe for creatonism is two-folded:

 

1. The bible is always right and history begun about 10.000 years ago. So everybod who says that a boone is older errs. When you find funny sceletons in some ancient stones, there must be a different reason for it, they are not older then 10.000 years.

 

Luckily even most christs do not agree with this part.

 

2. It is no pure luck that we are like we are and that we are here. If there is something so beautiful and nice like our planet and like all the wonderful flowers and animals, there must be a god who created these things.

 

This is a believe, as much as it is a believe that it is all pure luck and live luckily started due to some lightnings which hitted the right place on earth at the right time.

 

(Gerben) and the likelyhood of a story in some old dusty book to have anything to do with whatever happened is mind-boggling to me

 

Funnily enough, the best idea scientist have about the "production" of our planet is very close to what is written in the bible:

At first there was a light...then water, then earth, then plants then animal then man. (You can find this in the book Genesis... or while talking to Stephen Hawkins...)

 

And it is well known, that many ancient books, writings, tales and stories could be "true". Not if you take them word for word, but there is often a true story behind the lines. So I won´t doubt that there had been a big flood which killed anything in a big area. There had been bad years in Egypt which the Egyptians survived because a wise pharao decided to built warehouses. etc.

[Gerben42]

Funnily enough, the best idea scientist have about the "production" of our planet is very close to what is written in the bible:

At first there was a light...then water, then earth, then plants then animal then man. (You can find this in the book Genesis... or while talking to Stephen Hawkins...)

 

This is not a coincidence, these "elements" of creation are listed in order of complexity. Light as produced by stars like the sun is produced by throwing a lot (at least 0.08 solar masses) of the simplest possible substance, hydrogen, together. For water you need oxygen. Earth (rocks and stuff) requires heavier elements than that, but is still chemically simple. Then plants, animals and as a special case man.

 

The people of the time of the bible were just as intelligent as we are. They did the best explaining what they saw from limited knowledge.

 

And it is well known, that many ancient books, writings, tales and stories could be "true". Not if you take them word for word, but there is often a true story behind the lines. So I won´t doubt that there had been a big flood which killed anything in a big area. There had been bad years in Egypt which the Egyptians survived because a wise pharao decided to built warehouses. etc.

 

Me neither. I think it is interesting to research what caused these events. The flood will probably relate to the end of the last ice age, the plagues of Egypt seem to be caused by the Thera eruption (Santorini).

 

In a way, the world was created again 12000 years ago at the end of the ice age when temperatures shot up by so much that the current "climate change" seems like child's play.

[hrothgar]

Me neither. I think it is interesting to research what caused these events. The flood will probably relate to the end of the last ice age, the plagues of Egypt seem to be caused by the Thera eruption (Santorini).

The most interesting explanation that I have heard for the so-called "Great Flood" has to do with the expansion of the Black Sea.

 

There's a bunch of good information available at

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory

[matmat]

What does it mean to have read the Bible. Is it bad when I skipped over the endless "and X is the son of Y" list in Genesis?

 

if you skipped those parts, you're doomed, man... dooomed!

 

i remember a long time ago i was working on some problems that were called podasips.... prove or disprove and salvage if possible... anyhow. nothing can prove creationism. nothing can disprove it. the fact (yes, i will use the word fact) that evolution existed on earth does not mean that there was no creation. it could have happened earlier, or maybe didn't happen at all. maybe the universe has always existed in one way or another...

 

 

It's something you cannot prove or disprove. As I said before, I cannot disprove that the Earth, BBO and this forum have all been magically created N minutes ago. I can use Occam's razor and dismiss this hypothesis for any value of N, though.

 

a lot of the events described in the bible could have very well happened -- i recall reading somewhere that a lot of the ancient literature had references to a great flood etc. but to say that a book talks about A and B. and B proves to be true, doesn't mean that A is true, does it?

 

as for the earth i thought that

first there was a bang (the big one)

then there was little bit of cooking

then there were some heavier stars

then those stars went boom

then there were some new stars

these new stars got shiny rings

shiny rings started to coalesce

small droplets became large droplets

then a mediumish droplet got smacked by a slightly smaller mediumish droplet

then the now larger droplet started cooling

then a crust formed

then some chemical reactions occured

presto! life!

 

 

(btw it's stephen hawking)

[luke warm]

~~as for the earth i thought that

first there was a bang (the big one)~~

 

(btw it's stephen hawking)

it might be hawking, but he doesn't particularly like it... he prefers an explanation that doesn't fall into the old cause and effect thingy, or the 'from nothing nothing comes'

[han]

The people of the time of the bible were just as intelligent as we are.

Do you have any evidence for this fact?

[matmat]

The people of the time of the bible were just as intelligent as we are.

Do you have any evidence for this fact?

not sure. i think we may have evolved since then to be little more intelligent.

[han]

We both know that evolution of humans is not that fast. The concept "intelligent" isn't very clear, but I'd claim that if people were playing bridge at the time, they would be no match for today's players.

 

Anyway, I think that Gerben's claim is quite bold and probably false, but I don't know a lot about it so maybe I'm wrong.

[matmat]

it might be hawking, but he doesn't particularly like it... he prefers an explanation that doesn't fall into the old cause and effect thingy, or the 'from nothing nothing comes'

he's been wrong before, i'm sure he'll be wrong again.

 

there is a decoupling between the religious beliefs of top scientists and what their theories say. i think a number of times they have had a really tough time trusting their own work (or work of the time) b/c it was at odds with their beliefs. Even einstein had problems with quantum mechanics due to issues like that.

 

 

what bothers me on the religion vs. evolution issue is that the former tries to impose it's dogma on people without explanation, reasoning or semblance of proof and at the same time attempts to block people's access to the other, which has a little more going for it.

[Gerben42]

Anyway, I think that Gerben's claim is quite bold and probably false, but I don't know a lot about it so maybe I'm wrong.

 

True but any statement to the contrary would be even bolder, yes even arrogant. As others have said, evolution does not work fast enough to make much of a difference in 100 generations. Although intelligence may have stayed the same, knowledge now and knowledge then is incomparable. If we would be transported to earlier times (see for example "Timeline" or "Crusade in jeans") our knowledge would make us powerful. But make no mistake, odds are those people were just as smart / stupid as we are.

 

We have no way to be sure, brain size isn't everything either. We know Neanderthal man had bigger brains than ours. Were they smarter? No idea. Besides, Darwin's theory doesn't say "Survival of the smartest". Being smart didn't help the dinosaurs a bit.

[irdoz]

1. There's a lot of research into the well documented (at least for this and the last century) generational differences in intelligence (younger generations are on average more intelligent). There are probably major two reasons - improvement in nutrition and increased 'stimulation' (as well as a host of other possible factors). However, my understanding is that the impact of improved nutrition is to alter the shape of the curve with most impact on the shifting bottom half of the curve (ie where lower intelligence may have been due to poor nutrition). If you compare the top parts of the intelligence distribution between generations my understanding is that while differences still exist they are not so significant.

 

2. The growth of anti-bacterial resistance amongst baceteria (great explanations above) is one good example of evolution. Another is antiviral resistance. Probably the most studied and mapped virus is the HIV. It reproduces at an enormously fast rate and errors in its reproduction (the mutation rate) are very high. If you give a person with HIV one anitviral drug you can measure low level resistance within a fortnight (depending on their viral load) and high level resistance within 3 months. You need 3 different drugs to prevent the rapid development of resistance - with 2 the odds of simultaneous mutations at 2 different points are high enough for resistance to develop. It's probable in the future that antibacterial drugs will have to change to combination drugs (if we had the combinations to use) - some of the newer antiviral drugs are 'shape changers' - that is they change their shape to combat resistant targets.

[hotShot]

What do we know about intelligence some time ago?

Not much due to the lack of documents. But what we know should make quite clear that the people back than where smart.

 

Eratosthenes 225BC calculated earth circumference quite accurate. People were burned for knowing that about 1800 years later, I wonder who was more intelligent.

We still learn math found by Euclid, Thales or Pythagoras.

 

Nebra_skydisk 1600BC it seems to prove that even back than people where in contact between central Europe and Egypt.

 

Stonehenge 3000BC those people knew astronomy far better than most of us now. And they knew a lot about applied physics otherwise they would have been unable to build something like that.

 

There is evidence that we know a lot more facts today, but only little evidence that we are more intelligent.

[helene_t]

I think if we teleported a stone-age person to the present and tried an IQ test on him, odds are that he would score below average. For a number of reasons, obviously mainly cultural and other environment-related things. The question is not whether the genetic component of the evolution of human intelligence since the stone age is predominant (clearly it is not), the question is if it exists at all and what direction it has taken.

 

Some scientists have offered speculations about this. They are obviously very controversial. Jared Diamonds speculates that we are genetically slightly dumper today than we were 5000 years ago, because it has become gradually easier to survive without a good brain.Greg Clark thinks that the industrial revolution took place in England because the "Survival of the richest" mechanism had made the English smarter than other people. It's is interesting that academics can get away with such "racist" theories today. In the seventies a scientist would get lynched for using the words "sociology" and "biology" in the same sentence, and even in the 90's books like "The bell curve" were scandalized by reviewers who thought that knowing that a book discusses racial IQ differences is enough to dismiss it, one doesn't have to discuss its factual merits.

 

As I have already mentioned, I think current selection pressure is towards smarter men and dumper women, and that this was less so (maybe even reversed) in the past. Whether this has already had impact on the relative cognitive skills of the sexes, I don't know. It could also be a local/temporary thing. The current fashion among smarter women to have fewer children may not be a human universal. Also, it could be that fertility of women is related to environmental components of intelligence only, in which case it would not favor the spread of dumpness genes.

 

Anyway, I agree with the essense of Gerben's statement. Archimedes and Newton would probably both be pleased if told that today their theories have been kept up-to-date in the face of new evidence. Would the old-testament profets (assuming they realy existed) turn over in their graves if told that many of their followers stopped revising their stories, thus rendering them incompatible with new evidence?

[han]

Anyway, I think that Gerben's claim is quite bold and probably false, but I don't know a lot about it so maybe I'm wrong.

 

True but any statement to the contrary would be even bolder, yes even arrogant.

I believe it is a well known fact that children and teenagers' IQ scores are significantly higher today than 50 years ago (on average, and at least in the Netherlands). I recall that the difference was something like 10 points per generation, quite a bit.

 

I never claimed that evolution has anything to do with it. Clearly children are much healthier now than then and they go to school for many mor years. I bet they are also playing more games than they were thousands of years ago.

 

It is a mistake to think that you can learn only facts, intelligence can definitely be trained.

 

So while I can imagine that there were some ancient people that by todays standards would be considered smart, I think the vast majority would be considered really dumb (with a "b" Helene).

 

Does writing this make me more arrogant Gerben?

[cherdano]

Wow. Yes I think people today are on average much more intelligent than the people 200 years ago. Now I am bold and arrogant?

 

I think it should be the default assumption. I am sure a typical child today grows up in an environment much better suited to develop its curiosity in play/starting to have conversations/learn to read/will more likely learn an instrument/... All these have positive effects on the intelligence. Parents are better educated about what is good for the development of their children. Etc.

[mikeh]

Anyone doubting the salutary effects of diet can take a look at artefacts from centuries ago. I remember visiting the Tower of London many years ago and seeing a suit of armour worn by some long-dead royal. It was very small by today's standards. And a few years ago my wife and I visited Canterbury where there were still buildings from the Middle Ages. Their doors were very, very short. Few modern adults could walk through them without either ducking or getting a concussion.

 

So if our physiques have improved by diet, why shouldn't we accept that our minds have improved, since the development of intelligence in an individual will be influenced by diet (including the diet of the mother) and environment: stimuli afforded to the child?

 

This is not to say that the children of well-fed mothers 1000 or 10000 or 100000 years ago would not have the same genetic potential for intelligence as a modern child: merely to say that a child born to reasonably well-fed and well-educated (by historical standards) parent today is more likely to develop to the maximum or near-maximum potential than would be the case in the past.

 

I don't see this analysis as arrogant.

 

And I see this analysis as saying that the best and brightest of earlier times would fare well in comparison to the best and brightest of today... but there may be more today than yesterday, pre capita, because more infants today, per capita, will have favourable circumstances in which to develop.

[hotShot]

It is a mistake to think that you can learn only facts, intelligence can definitely be trained.

If you mean, that 2 weeks of lying lazy at the beach lets your IQ points drop a few points, while a little mind jogging helps to keep it's level, than you are right.

 

But in general repeated IQ tests, generally lead to similar results +- a few points.

[hotShot]

I think it should be the default assumption. I am sure a typical child today grows up in an environment much better suited to develop its curiosity in play/starting to have conversations/learn to read/will more likely learn an instrument/... All these have positive effects on the intelligence. Parents are better educated about what is good for the development of their children. Etc.

So you think that living in a natural environment, learning everything about thousands of plants and animals does no make you curious?

Not even if your life depends on knowing what you can eat and what is a threat?

You think that learning how to form stones into tools or make use of natural materials (e.g. to make clothing) has no positive effect on intelligence?

 

Good that I know your question was rhetorical ......

[hotShot]

1 First God made heaven & earth 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

I like to ask those who take the bible literally:

Prior to the creation of the earth, the light and the day, how much time had gone bye and why should an eternal being as god measure it?

[Fluffy]

I have a lot of problems with eternity, no doubt a human brain can't think of anything infinite. But my biggest problem was about god think of what happened before, and before, and before, I can't conceive something without a begining, except if its cyclic.

 

Maybe god sees time as a 4th dimension and travels through it the same way we would take a walk.

 

I was thinking about evolution this evening and asked myself why there isn't any form of life who lives exclusively between water and air?, a life form whose density is almost constant and would never sink nor get above the water.

 

Such life form wouldn't need eyes, since its habitat is 2-dimensional, would only perceive things wich are in his 'world'.

 

Ok, this actually has no sense since all physic rules we know are 3 dimensional, and senses are based upon them. But still I wondered if there wouldn't be a 4th dimension out there wich we were unable to perceive at all.