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Evolution's Bottom Line

Fade

The Great Master Bates
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/opinion/12Thorpe.html?th&emc=th (Registration Required)

By HOLDEN THORP
Published: May 12, 2006
Chapel Hill, N.C.

THE usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity and evolution, is to make predictions. When theories make practicable foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the new things that we enjoy — like global positioning systems, which rely on the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible, which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of gravity.
Creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way. The creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from a judge in Pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to evolution amounted to the teaching of religion. They prevailed, however, in Kansas, where the school board changed the definition of science to accommodate the teaching of intelligent design.
Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does.
Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution. Recent, exciting examples are humanized antibodies like Remicade for inflammation and Herceptin for breast cancer, both initially made in mice. Without our knowledge of the evolution of mice and humans and their immune systems, we wouldn't have such life-saving and life-improving technologies.
Another specific example is resistant bacterial infections, one of the scariest threats to public health. The ones that are resistant to antibiotics are more reproductively successful than their non-resistant relatives and pass the new resistance genes on to more offspring. Just as Darwin said 150 years ago.
The creationists have devised a tortuous work-around for this phenomenon, which endorses natural selection and survival of the fittest, but says that evolution doesn't explain the original development of species. The problem is, there are hundreds of genes that occur in both bacteria and humans. It's hard to see why a designer would do it that way, since having the same genes in bacteria and humans makes infections harder to treat: drugs that act on bacterial gene products act on the human versions as well, so those drugs could kill both the bacterium and the human host. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So evolution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?
One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than 600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts. Kansas has 11.
In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush mentioned our problems in science education and promised to focus on "keeping America competitive" by increasing the budget for research and spending money to get more science teachers. I hope he delivers, but we can't keep America competitive if some states teach science that has no commercial utility. Those smart youngsters in India and China whom you keep hearing about are learning secular science, not biblical literalism.
The battle is about more than which truth is truthier, it's about who will be allowed to innovate and where they will do it. Sequestering our scientists in California and Massachusetts makes no sense. We need to allow everyone to participate and increase the chance of finding the innovations to improve society and compete globally.
Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school.
Holden Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.
 

Jayhawker Soule

-- untitled --
Premium Member
Fade said:
Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution.
This is clearly an absurd non sequitur.
 

St0ne

Active Member
Your right, but you can't deny that a lot have progress has been made with the help of evolution theory.
 

Zsr1973

Member
Without the bible, most people would likely accept evolution.

If you look carefully, when God did creation, it happened in an order that is agreeable with an evolutionary process.:

Day 1: Light (the sun forms)
2: Waters separate forming on earth
3: Water recedes allowing land to come forth, plant life begins as we know it
4: Stars become visible on the face of the earth
5: Animals begin to emerge on the earth
6: after animals, man comes next...

Could evolution be one of the processes that God uses to create?
 

Opethian

Active Member
Could evolution be one of the processes that God uses to create?

Why the need to involve IDE's (Imaginary Divine Entities) into processes that work perfectly fine without any divine intervention?

I may take a patent on the word IDE. :D
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Opethian said:
Why the need to involve IDE's (Imaginary Divine Entities) into processes that work perfectly fine without any divine intervention?

I may take a patent on the word IDE. :D

Can you prove that there is in fact no input from Divine entity/ies ?
 

Opethian

Active Member
Can you prove that there is in fact no input from Divine entity/ies?

Can I irrefutably prove this? No.
Is there evidence suggesting that there is input from any divine entities in the evolutionary process? No.
Is there evidence suggesting that there is no input from any divine entities in the evolutionary process? Yes, and plentiful.

I think our current scientific knowledge of this universe, on any schale (earth, organisms, the entire universe) should lead us to think, that if there ever was a god, he could only have interfered a tiny amount of time before the big bang. If there is a god, then the only thing he did was trigger the big bang, because everything after the big bang just follows because of action and response, by our universal physical laws.
But then if you're going to say that a god triggered the big bang, why couldn't it have just as well been a natural process that we haven't been able to figure out yet? Why the need for a god to explain things?
 

stemann

Time Bandit
But then if you're going to say that a god triggered the big bang, why couldn't it have just as well been a natural process that we haven't been able to figure out yet? Why the need for a god to explain things?

Why can God not be the natural process that we haven't been able to figure out yet? Conventional science as is practised by the majority of the scientific community does not hold for (and past) singularities- these include black holes and the beginning of the Universe. So since it is equally valid and equally invalid to say either 'God created the big bang' or 'The big bang just happened' or 'something external to the universe caused the big bang,' arguments to this effect are meaningless because there is no evidence either way.

It's hard to see why a designer would do it that way, since having the same genes in bacteria and humans makes infections harder to treat: drugs that act on bacterial gene products act on the human versions as well, so those drugs could kill both the bacterium and the human host. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You can't use the concept of 'Why would God do this?' as evidence against the existence of God, because the answer is 'God works in mysterious ways.'

Could evolution be one of the processes that God uses to create?

Well, He could also have sent Hitler to kill a load of Jews. He could have used super-ultra-laser guided missiles to destroy the planet that used to be there before it became the asteroid belt. He could have set fire to my kitchen that time when it was on fire. I don't see any reason for Him to either do or not do these things. No conclusions are therefore drawn by me.

Is there evidence suggesting that there is no input from any divine entities in the evolutionary process? Yes, and plentiful.

You can't have evidence suggesting the absence of something. It's logically impossible. All you can have is evidence suggesting the presence of something, and then being able to say that that 'something' is not some other thing, and so the some other thing was not present.

There are still problems with this though, since there is no reason why God has to have had anything to do with evolution. If evolution is physically possible and actually happened, this does not provide any evidence for or against the existence of God.

Why the need to involve IDE's (Imaginary Divine Entities) into processes that work perfectly fine without any divine intervention?

Can you prove that there is in fact no input from Divine entity/ies ?

Michel, why does the impossibility of proving the non-existence of something lead to the assumption/belief that it exists?
 

Halcyon

Lord of the Badgers
Opethian said:


If there is a god, then the only thing he did was trigger the big bang, because everything after the big bang just follows because of action and response, by our universal physical laws.
I hate to point out the obvious, but if God created the universe, then He wrote those laws. There doesn't need to be any interferance by God after the big bang if He designed those universal laws to run just fine without Him.
 

Opethian

Active Member
I hate to point out the obvious, but if God created the universe, then He wrote those laws. There doesn't need to be any interferance by God after the big bang if He designed those universal laws to run just fine without Him.

That's exactly what I meant.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Opethian said:
Can I irrefutably prove this? No.
Is there evidence suggesting that there is input from any divine entities in the evolutionary process? No.
Is there evidence suggesting that there is no input from any divine entities in the evolutionary process? Yes, and plentiful.

I think our current scientific knowledge of this universe, on any schale (earth, organisms, the entire universe) should lead us to think, that if there ever was a god, he could only have interfered a tiny amount of time before the big bang. If there is a god, then the only thing he did was trigger the big bang, because everything after the big bang just follows because of action and response, by our universal physical laws.
But then if you're going to say that a god triggered the big bang, why couldn't it have just as well been a natural process that we haven't been able to figure out yet? Why the need for a god to explain things?

Because until the day when science manages to recreate the Big Bang, set evolution into motion (without using any already existing material), I believe God 'did it' (even if the universe existed before he did).
 

Fade

The Great Master Bates
michel said:
Because until the day when science manages to recreate the Big Bang, set evolution into motion (without using any already existing material), I believe God 'did it' (even if the universe existed before he did).

Why? Why not believe it was sneezed into existence by an enormous space donkey?
 

sandy whitelinger

Veteran Member
Zsr1973 said:
Without the bible, most people would likely accept evolution.

If you look carefully, when God did creation, it happened in an order that is agreeable with an evolutionary process.:

Day 1: Light (the sun forms)
2: Waters separate forming on earth
3: Water recedes allowing land to come forth, plant life begins as we know it
4: Stars become visible on the face of the earth
5: Animals begin to emerge on the earth
6: after animals, man comes next...

Could evolution be one of the processes that God uses to create?

Why do you assume that the light was the sun?
 

Opethian

Active Member
Why do you assume that the light was the sun?

Since we're talking about the creation of light on earth, and what provides the earth with light? The sun. Or do you think he just created a giant light bulb so he could see what he was doing before he made the sun :D.
 

sandy whitelinger

Veteran Member
Opethian said:
Since we're talking about the creation of light on earth, and what provides the earth with light? The sun. Or do you think he just created a giant light bulb so he could see what he was doing before he made the sun :D.

Opethian made a funny. What then was the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night created on the 4th day?
 

alexander garcia

Active Member
Hi, I ask one thing if I may? Gravity was one of the things mentioned. Can anyone tell what gravity is, and what it is maid of? And to make it clear please do it without simply discribing what has been created. My claim is that you can no more tell what gravity is, than you can tell where it comes from. All you can do is take what Yahvah has made, what you can see and then invent unprovable theories. A negative can never be proven.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Did you miss a week of high school physics, Alexander?
Gravity is an extradimensional dent in spacetime caused by the mass of the Earth (or any other mass, of course). Objects "fall" to Earth as they slide down the gravitational incline.
You can picture this in two dimensions as a bowling ball resting on a trampoline, but our 3-D minds cannot picture the phenomonon as it actually occurs in multiple dimensions.

Why is magic a more believable explanation for a phenomonon than mechanism?
Whence this insistance that all phenomona must have a conscious agent behind them?
 
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