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100 Reasons Why Evolution Is Stupid (Part 1 of 11)

Paul Davies (British astrophysicist): "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all....It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming". (4)Davies, P. 1988. The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability To Order the Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, p.203.
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Well, as you can see not all scientists agree with an atheist interpretation of the data.
 
Tatyana said:
Seriously?

I have only seen the really retarded banana thing by Comfort.

Surely someone can't be more retarded than this?

I fear for humanity if this is true.
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Well Dr.:rolleyes:Hovind did claim that "one drop of water will cover the earth if you spread it real thin".

While I understand that the concept of evolution is kinda hard to grasp because of the enormous time scales involved, being unaware of such basic concepts as elements and molecules puts the self-proclaimed science enthusiast Dr.:DHovind on his own monumental pedestal of ignorance.

Makes you wonder about the quality of his audience and supporters, too.
 
dio said:
Incorrect.
Because of all the evidence from different fields, evolution is now widely accepted. That's why it's taught in science class.

The only ones not accepting it (because it offends their particular MagicMan® mith) are some rare psychopathic religious nutters, concentrated in insignificant, shrinking pockets of stupid.
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It amazes me that theists try to prove the existence of gods through science in the first place. I suppose they must try because the scientific method has proven its effectiveness in transforming the world in the last 250 years more than any god changed human civilization from the dawn of humans. There is no denying that science is an accepted baseline of truth in the realm of the measurable and testable and they cannot reject it entirely without losing the ear of most people who listen to them.

But it paints them in a corner. Gods are not testable or measurable, in fact it is outright "sinful" in some religions to dare to test the deity (a big tough god that one is, huh?). But don't they realize that to try and use science to prove deities requires that they must start in full agreement with current science, including evolution, and then they must produce extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claims which keep getting struck down here by ordinary evidence.

Talk about banging your head against a brick wall hoping if you keep hitting it hard enough the pain will go away...

I almost feel sorry for them.
 
six7s said:
Alas, even if you regard the USA as insignificant, this ain't so :(

Public Acceptance of Evolution
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Oh. Oh, dear...

:eye-poppi

I highly recommend visiting that article, if only to see the graphic of the cross-national study showing what percentage of adults in each of 34 countries believes in evolution (well, believed in it in 2005, and I highly doubt that there's been a sea change in the past 5 years). Denmark and Sweden were #2 and #3 (yay! waves the Viking flag.) The U.S. was...

(wait for it)

(oh, you know what's coming)

(actually, this is worse than I thought)

#33. Out of 34. Turkey was #34.


Anyway... As six7s pointed out...

Over the past 20 years, the percentage of U.S. adults accepting the idea of evolution has declined from 45% to 40% and the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48% to 39%. The percentage of adults who were not sure about evolution increased from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.
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I think one way to explain this might be that people have simply responded to confusing cultural messages about what evolution actually is. On the one hand, there's more information available that actually is accurate, which means that fewer people are likely to outright reject it; on the other hand, I think that more inaccurate info is also available and that some antievolutionary propaganda has become slicker. The end result is that when people are confronted with a question about it, their feelings on the subject are very confused and that's reflected in a three hundred percent increase in the number of "I'm just not sure" answers.

And thanks for all the birthday wishes! There will be carrot cake at the actual party, but everyone can feel free to substitute whatever kind they prefer. :)
 
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aggle-rithm said:
They not only believe in evolution, they believed in a kind of SUPER evolution that can generate millions of new species in just a few thousand years.
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Well that can be explained by magic. God did it.

Science, on the other hand, is hard.

A chromoewhatsit did what with a monkey? VS Oh, God did it, cool.
 
Maia said:
Oh. Oh, dear...

:eye-poppi

I highly recommend visiting that article, if only to see the graphic of the cross-national study showing what percentage of adults in each of 34 countries believes in evolution (well, believed in it in 2005, and I highly doubt that there's been a sea change in the past 5 years). Denmark and Sweden were #2 and #3 (yay! waves the Viking flag.) The U.S. was...

(wait for it)

(oh, you know what's coming)

(actually, this is worse than I thought)

#33. Out of 34. Turkey was #34.
<snip>
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Don't forget to wave the Viking flag for Iceland (#1).
 
154 said:
Of course not.

When evolutionary theory is so-distilled down to the irreducible
it is obviously so absurd that no one, even you God-haters, can accept it.
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Waging wars in La-La Land?
 
sphenisc said:
Yes it's the correct link. The first quote goes against my point as you said. The second says " many people still do not think of the term "apes" to include humans at all. ", since words are defined by usage - that agrees with my point.
The fact that "non-human great apes" is used with increasing frequency is not sufficient to demonstrate that the alternative usage is wrong. It is reasonable to suggest it makes the term ambiguous.
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Fair enough, then why didn't you say that instead of:
sphenisc said:
Humans evolved from apes. Humans aren't apes.
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sphenisc said:
Who can the animal at 11 o'clock breed with?
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The one at 10 o'clock (or another at 11 o'clock, of course).

If I understand the example, the creatures spread around the lake over time, slowly diverging as they went. By the time the first ones to complete the circuit got back to 12 o'clock, the differences from the animals still living there were sufficient that they could not interbreed. Of course, the animals still at 12 o'clock may now be different from the ones that started the exercise, since they will have been subject to natural selection over the same time too.

I think that's a slightly different case from the one I've heard about before with birds, I think gulls, around the Atlantic; I can't remember if that is completely circular.
 
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temporalillusion said:
How do you know? Define macro-evolution first. Unless you define it, how can we decide if it's occurred?

(The answer is yes it has been observed BTW)
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Then you need to answer your own question - how do you know? What's your definition?
 
Tricky said:
I know that. I'm just trying to jog him into reality. Evolution does not say a sheep "changed into" anything or that anything "changed into" a sheep, but at one time there were creatures that might have been called "sheep" or "goats" (depending on who was doing the labeling) and those common ancestors "changed" into what we presently call sheep or goats. Much of this is clear in the fossil record, but some folks need to be led by the hand.
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Badly garbled Tricky - did something change into a sheep or not?
 
sphenisc said:
Badly garbled Tricky - did something change into a sheep or not?
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No. Nothing "changed into" a sheep.

You had a distant ancestor of a sheep, which may have had some sheep like characteristics but was not what we today would identify as a sheep. Over many generations, mutations, natural selection and other selection processes gradually altered this proto-sheep into something more and more recognisable as what we see as sheep today.

There would have been many many intermediate stages that you could look at and say that it was or was not a sheep, but the gradual process would eventually get to the point at which speciation occurred. You would then have an early sheep, still not a modern sheep, but different enough from the proto-sheep to be classified differently and for viable breeding to no longer take place.

This early sheep would still not be a modern sheep, but would, over many generations, deviate again into a further sheep development. Possibly branching out into lines which died off, or further deviated from the original. The "sheep" branch that was headed for modern day sheep would keep changing through the generations, each one subtly different from the last until you get far enough down the line where a new generation can no longer breed with animals similar to an older one.

Eventually these minor deviations would result in a modern sheep. I suppose you could call this changing into a sheep, but in my experience, when someone uses the term "changing into" they mean in one generation, or one animal magically altering itself. These are of course, strawmen, and evolution predicts nothing of the sort. The reason you can't have cats giving birth to dogs or a dinosaur magically growing an eye and deciding it needs another one is because of the way the selection branches these animals out, and the fact that evolution happens gradually, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but still fairly gradually, to populations, not a single animal.
 
I've devised an analogy.

Consider: If all computer files consist of a finite binary sequence, it is possible to change any file into any other file by a series of mutations, each of which consists of a change in file length or a change of the value of one digit.

If we took a file, applied a range of different mutations to it and then used an algorithm to remove some of the mutations according to specific criteria, and repeated the process with the new files, we would see a trend towards files with the characteristics favoured by the algorithm.

If these characteristics matched those of a different type of file, then the files involved would eventually change into this new type.

Hence, micro-evolution to macro-evolution. From an impersonal viewpoint, it is simply a matter of scale, a greater degree of differentiation; The human labelling systems create the illusion of types.
 
David Henson said:
So if the apes hadn't evolved into us they would have died?

You don't realize how stupid that is?!
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It isn't. If species didn't evolve they couldn't adapt to changing conditions and would indeed die out. There'd be nothing alive left on Earth by now.

Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it stupid.
 
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