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Most atheists do not know what science says about our origins

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AudioFreak said:
Because that's the one people talk about most. The ties between apes and humans is an active area of interest for scientists and is fueled in other areas by the ever-so-popular "I ain't no monkey" chant from the creationist camp. I'm also gonna go out on a limb and say there's probably more that can be learned about humans by studying closer relatives than speculating about Chad.
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Chad is very interesting in the study of what life is. But in the study of what makes us human Lucy is far more relevant.
 
AudioFreak said:
The problem comes when other ideas are brought to the table and DOC plugs his ears and yells "SCIENCE SAYS SO!" It's not exactly an effective way to have a discussion, especially about something that's largely speculative.
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I see what you (and others) are saying.

The reflexive disagreement still strikes me as strange, but there are plenty of weirder things in the world.
 
Foster Zygote said:
We didn't evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor with chimps. We also share a common ancestor with reptiles, fish and bacteria. This is common knowledge to anyone with even a basic understanding of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
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I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).

An I would also estimate no more than 3% , at most, of the world's population know that according to science man evolved from bacteria.

We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
 
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DOC said:
We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
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Sorry, DOC. You don't have to sell fact. It simply is. The only selling needs to be done by the "*poof* Yay, God created us!" side of the fence.
 
Meadmaker said:
I see what you (and others) are saying.

The reflexive disagreement still strikes me as strange, but there are plenty of weirder things in the world.
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It's not reflexive disagreement that drives me, just accuracy. I admit to saying incorrect things. But, when people correct me, I do all in my power to change my statements to reflect truth. It's somewhat of a driving force in my being.

So, when talking with DOC, i was simply trying to get him to see that his initial statement is far from a "Science says so" thing. The fact that horizontal gene transfer can occur eliminates the ability for us to say 1 single solitary celled organism poofed into being and all came from that. It could easily have been a cohort of stuffs that came about simultaneously that resulted in life as we know it.

My argument wasn't to refute common ancestry but to refute the concept of what the nature of that common ancestor was.
 
DOC said:
Anyway, what I was interested in was the fact that (according to science) humans not only evolved from bacteria but at a later stage in the process we evolved from fish and then from reptiles.
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Sounds like a big fat lie to me. You were apparently actually interested in discrediting atheists in general because of some mistaken notion you have about their knowledge on the subject of evolution. Your own knowledge is dismally lacking in the area of evolution and in the area of what constitutes common knowledge among atheists, and among scientists, too, for that matter. Actually what you've demonstrated is that your own "knowledge" on both of these issues is nothing more than your obviously uninformed opinion.
 
DOC said:
I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).

An I would also estimate no more than 3% , at most, of the world's population know that according to science man evolved from bacteria.

We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
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The evidence of the ape common ancestor is fairly well established.

BTW, I've sat in on talks doing comparitive biology of antioxidant enzymes, and you be amazed at how well simalarities of an enzyme like superoxide dismutase fits into the heirarchy of species already established. It's a beautiful thing. It allows us to know which part of the enzyme is truly needed(typically part of the active center), because these sequences don't change from speices to speices. Presumably becuase any mutation in this area would result in inactivation of function and thereby kill of that species. (this works only for enzymes which are truly critical for survival like superoxide dismutase).
 
DOC said:
I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).

An I would also estimate no more than 3% , at most, of the world's population know that according to science man evolved from bacteria.

We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
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Estimate, as in pull out of your ass.
 
DOC said:
I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).
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You strongly disagree based on what, your own ignorance? What personal experience do you base these figures on? Unless you yourself have some relevant data that constitutes a statistically valid sample the figures you've quoted are nothing more than an uninformed guess.

An I would also estimate no more than 3% , at most, of the world's population know that according to science man evolved from bacteria.
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So now you're talking about the world population as a whole. I thought that this thread was about the knowledge possessed by atheists.

We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
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Who is "we"? People who are largely ignorant of modern biology? And how is it "A better sell"?
 
DOC said:
I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).

An I would also estimate no more than 3% , at most, of the world's population know that according to science man evolved from bacteria.

We just hear mostly about man coming from apes. And I believe that is possibly because it is a better sell.
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You make it sound as if the apes and bacteria are competing explanations. This makes no sense at all.
 
DOC said:
I strongly disagree. Since there are no figures or polls as to how many people knew that humans evolved from bacteria (according to science), one can only estimate from one's experience. In my opinion no more than 10% at the most of atheists know man evolved from bacteria (a to s).
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So, just how many atheists do you know?
 
AudioFreak said:
Because that's the one people talk about most. The ties between apes and humans is an active area of interest for scientists and is fueled in other areas by the ever-so-popular "I ain't no monkey" chant from the creationist camp. I'm also gonna go out on a limb and say there's probably more that can be learned about humans by studying closer relatives than speculating about Chad.
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And since we're talking about the last universal ancestor...do you think we should call it Chadam (like Adam)... Chad sounds male... and we know it was asexual.


Yes... the mapping of the human genome and the chimp genome pretty much confirmed Darwin was right... and the whole tree of life common ancestor thing... But for the scientific ignoramuses who can't stomach the fact that we share a common ancestor with chimps... we try to present the info. slowly--and the evidence is amazing and compelling... but one step at a time. And I think that Doc is a Young Earth Creationist who doesn't even understand how we know we share a common ancestor with apes-- so his assertions about what "Science says" is, as Fran noted, an insincere attempt to infer that this is absurd... while offering not a wit of evidence or hint of an alternate explanation.

And Meadmaker...a plastid is an "organelle"-- something inside a cell that is thought to have had a lifeish existence on it's own...like mitochondria. Eukaryotes are cells that have these little cell like "organs" inside them... that they've engulfed... Eukaryotes show a common ancestor but there are other cell lines and whether prokaryotes and archae have a singular ancestor with the other two is something we are just figuring out, because we are just learning how abundant life and the stuff of life is... Whether it was a community of cell-ish things that gave rise to the 3 branches or some singular membrane bound structure is not known yet. Life is very much a continuum at the molecular level... and so it might be hard to define even what the first cell was... or whether life started even more primitively in a single strand of RNA... or whether RNA fragments were abundant. But all life on this planet does carry the same DNA code--and we use the code to determine how far back in time two life forms shared a common ancestor...

All life that we know of shares a common ancestor...but what exactly that ancestor was in form is not completely worked out yet...
 
AudioFreak said:
Sorry, DOC. You don't have to sell fact. It simply is. The only selling needs to be done by the "*poof* Yay, God created us!" side of the fence.
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Yep, you don't need to threaten people and make promises and have faith in evolution. The facts are really easy to see for yourself... but creationists love to make it sound like it's "impossible" (as though their invisible overlord was more likely.) The facts for evolution keep amassing and even if humans never figured it out, the story would still be there in our DNA just as it always has been. That is something that an actual omniscient omnibenevolent entity should have mentioned rather than all that stuff about how to sacrifice assorted animals and who you should stone and when.
 
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