Britons Unconvinced on Evolution 2035
pryonic writes "The BBC is reporting that more than half of Britons do not believe in evolution, with a further 40% advocating that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science classes. I'm a Brit myself, and I thought most people over here thought these views were outdated and lacked substance. None of my close friends give any credit to creationism or ID, but we're all well educated athiests so I guess that's to be expected. Maybe I've been blind to the views of the majority in this proudly secular country?"
Proudly secular? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Proudly secular? (Score:2, Informative)
You're right about the Royal Family and religion, it all stems back a long way into our history. But the vast majority of modern Brits, religious or not, believe that the church has no right intefering in state affairs. Hence why we're one of the most secular states in Europe.
Re:Not surprised (Score:1, Informative)
I call major bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ambiguity (Score:2, Informative)
There's something wrong here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Proudly secular? (Score:2, Informative)
s.
The power in reacting seriously (Score:3, Informative)
The real success of the ID campaign is its rousin gup of the audience, inciting people into a fury of various emotions, and making the subject altogether taboo.
I tire of all these emotional responses, for that's what ID wants. When we seriously react to it as if it were serious, we give it power. A better reponse is to shirk it off, giggle a bit, and equate it to an urban legend... why not add it to Snopes?
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:5, Informative)
No. Fossil records do not show DNA. However the clues in our genomes today show that what happened was that in a human ancestor one chromosome split into two.
If not, then explain how a (presumably) mutant new example of an "evolved" chimpanzee with 22 pairs of chromosomes can find another exactly evolved 22-paired mutant -- at the same time -- in the same place -- recognize him or her -- and develop a brand new and unique mating ritual that works. All of these steps are recognized as being necessary to begin to form a new species.
These are not the steps recognized as being necessary to form a new species. It is not clear that the offspring of a 22-pair mutant and a 21-pair non-mutant would be infertile, so it might not be necessary for two 22-pair mutants to mate. And there is certainly no reason for a new mating ritual to magically appear or for mutants to recognise each other.
That said, to deny Darwinism is to ignore the stages and features our own embryos develop and discard: gills, tail, front legs.
This is also incorrect, and has been widely discredited. I wonder if I have just been trolled.
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
such fusions happen relatively often, and usually result in individuals that can live perfectly normal lives, although they're somewhat less fertile than their conspecifics. the very rare thing is for such a mutation to become fixed in a genome and spread widely; in vertebrate animals, that sort of thing is genetically tricky. (though obviously not impossible, considering humans exist.)
see also: http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html [gate.net]
Re:Proudly secular? (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that we have a state religion. It's also true that it receives no government funding and is followed by a minority of people.
It's true that our head of state is the Queen. It's also true that the monarchy lacks any real power and is kept around out of tradition.
It's true that our schools are legally bound to provide collective daily worship of a Christian nature. It's also true that more than three-quarters of schools ignore this law, and that parents have the legal right to have their kids opt out anyway.
I think you are mixing up England and the UK too. While it's true that there's a Church of England and a Church of Scotland, other areas of the UK got rid of their official faiths.
So technically we are under the rule of a religious monarchy, but in practice we are a modern democratic secular country.
Re:Enough Already (Score:4, Informative)
It does when you and your friends get elected to my daughter's school district board and have it taught to her in science class as if it was equivalent to "believing" that the world is a sphere.
Believe what you want... but don't put in my kid's science curriculum.
I'm teaching my kid to be rational and reasoned. I don't need her being confused by "junk science" being taught to her as if it were real science.
Yes.. your beliefs detract from my well-being (and my families) when you legislate them into law and into school curriculums.
That's where the Christian fundies crossed the line.
Re:The Economist (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:3, Informative)
The only fact I am afraid you got right is that our current knowledge of evolution is far from complete. There is still a lot that we don't know like how did life start. Lots of theories but none that have been proven. How the first eye evolved. The jump from single to multicellular. There are lots of unanswered questions but none require ID.
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but I can assist people IRL with their personal failings, however I can't make up for years of poor science teachers and countless hours of study in a couple of paragraphs. It's not as if the people will actually READ the links we could post to http://talkorigins.org/ [talkorigins.org] that counter every single creationist talking-point.
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:2, Informative)
You know, f you had completed reading my OP...in fact, if you had merely read one sentence past the one you chose to quote, you would have found that I addressed the issue of choices not having to be exclusive.
Here is the relevant sentence for you, to save wear-and-tear on your scroll wheel:What you're advocating is the 'teach the controversy' bunkum I alluded to in the OP. Here's why it's bunkum:there is no controversy. ID/Creationism, not being falsifiable, is not science, and does not belong in a science classroom. Period. If ID is allowed into the science clssroom, then you must also include other alternative explanations such as Flying Spaghetti Monsterism [venganza.org] and Last Thursdayism [washington.edu]. Otherwise, you're betraying the very 'objectivity' you profess to espouse.
Re:Proudly secular? (Score:5, Informative)
More importantly, they can get voted in without being Christian. I believe that if somebody wanted to make it an issue, they could overturn the requirements that various USA states have on constitutional grounds. However, even if they did that, not being a Christian would be a severe impediment to their election campaign.
Take a look at the Education Reform Act 1988 [opsi.gov.uk]:
You'll be pleased to know that 76% of schools break this law [bbc.co.uk].
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:5, Informative)
The is good evidence [gate.net] based on structural analysis of human chromosome 2 that it is the fused version of two chromosomes found in modern apes.
The genetics of "Post-zygotic Isolating Mechanisms" of speciation is under much study now. Here is a great review [usc.edu] of speciation mechanisms.
Generally the strong force on post-zygotic speciation is "epistasis", negatively interacting genetic loci. So different and negatively interacting genes are more important in speciation than slight differences in chromosomal configuration. There are some speciation events driven mainly by chromosomal configuration, though most are not.
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:3, Informative)
Just because you don't understand the science doesn't mean that it's not true. Explaining how it works would fill several pages. Your best bet is to enroll in a genetics course, study hard for a few years, and then you will understand how it's not only possible but probable.
Re:bullshit! (Score:4, Informative)
Evolution and intelligent design are simply philosophies, not science. Neither should be taught in science, nor is the teaching of interspecial evolution absolutely essential to learning anything in biology.
Evolution is an inevitable consequence when you have the following ingredients:
- A genome that replicates with less-than-100% fidelity.
- A phenotype that is dependent from the genotype
- A fitness that is dependent from the phenotype
Create such a system, and you'll see it evolve. It's facts: it has been simulated thousands of times in computers, for example. Life is such a system: therefore it will evolve.
Re:Ambiguity (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing denominational about it. In some towns, there is one Catholic church that is the above, and all the others just kind of limp along. In others, it's the Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist or Baptist church. In certain areas it's an Assembly of God church or a big, non-demoninational. There is a bit of a "network effect" with churches, too. In Idaho & Utah, it's a Church of Latter Day Saints. Certainly the Mormons have made a rather big business out of it, as has historically the Roman Catholic church in the US.
Theory vs. Hypothesis (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:3, Informative)
Wouldn't that be nice.
Sadly, I believe that the ID movement merely *started* as a PR campaign. Currently, it is believed in by a large horde of morons.
Well, okay. Let's say "a large horde of morons who do not see this as a PR campaign".
Re:Ambiguity (Score:1, Informative)
No. It is not. That is a lie.
Re:Is Darwinism the Only Factor? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:5, Informative)
Your post illustrates that you do not understand what a "theory" is in the context of science.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Hope this helps.
Re:Please remain factual (Score:3, Informative)
There is simply "Evolution". Small changes over time. Given enough time, the accumulation of change is great. Humans didn't evolve from monkeys, humans and monkeys evolved independently from the same ancient ancestor. You won't find, and wouldn't expect to find, an "intermediate" species between humans and monkeys... that's like saying there's an intermediate race between caucasoid and mongoloid (i.e. "Why haven't we found a race of people that are in between caucasian and oriental?") Common ancestry does not imply an intermediate species.
I just wish this whole "rapture" thingy would get here already... the rest of us would like to advance as a species without the fundamentalists christians holding us back.
Re:what does it matter anyways? (Score:3, Informative)
A thought about the primordial soup... (Score:3, Informative)
Applying this to the origin of life, a combination of aminoacids which can self-replicate will flourish in comparison of those that don't. In those replications there are flaws, changes or mutations. Those that can multiply, will.
Proteins are nothing but a composition of aminoacids. Aminoacids can be produced "spontaneously" in the right conditions. I'm sure that at some point, enough different aminoacids were present so that a simple chemical reaction
(thunder, UV light) would bond them together.
Why is it difficult to believe in the primordial soup? Let's think about it. According to Ramsey's Theorem [wikipedia.org] in an infinite discrete space, any specific combination of words can be found (this is also known as the infinite monkeys with typewriters writing a work of Shakespeare). So, what happens if we get enough proteins all mixed together, waiting for yet another catalyst?
(I can testify something about the Ramsey's theorem. I know a guy who based a computer research paper on it for pattern recognition. [psu.edu] And the thing worked.)
200 million years could be enough time for simple microorganisms to form. The earch is 4.5 billion years old. Think about it.
Have you guys noticed how the book of Genesis starts with... "and the Spirit of God floated above the waters"? I was taught in school that the first lifeforms on earth originated on the surface of the sea.
Maybe the problem with creationists is not that they don't believe in evolution, but that they find it to be physically impossible. Lack of faith perhaps? I wonder, why is it so easy for them to believe that God made Adam and Eve out of a pile of mud, and yet so difficult that God let the aminoacids combine and form simple organisms that would later combine and evolve?
Creationists
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:3, Informative)
ROFL... take a physical chemistry class sometime. Belive me a little knowlegde can be dangerous, and you have very little.
The 2nd law states that the entropy of a closed system must always increase. Lifeforms are not closed systems, they exchange energy, matter, and information with other systems. So there is no problem with the 2nd law!
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:5, Informative)
One idea posited by Intelligent Design is that the strong and weak nuclear forces...
The fact that the Weak Anthropic Principle is true (and it can't help being true...it's a tautology) does not mean that the Strong Anthropic Principle is true. You'll need to do better than that.
Another idea posed by Intelligent design is that there is a certain minimum amount of information needed to have life--things like ribosomes and transcriptase...
This argument is equal parts misdirection and bunk. Self-replicating molecules can work with only a strand of six DNA nucleotides. Such a self-replicating molecule could have easily formed via pre-biotic chemistry. As life developed, such self-replicating molecules would have been outcompeted and extinguished by other, more complex groups of molecules.
Did it happen in this way? Frankly, I don't know. But saying "I don't know how it could have happened....so God did it" is a classic argument from incredulity. Besides which, evolution has never purported to explain abiogenesis anyway so the entire argument is beside the point.
Intelligent Design posits that life began within one hundred million years after life became possible (shortly after cooling to the point of liquid water.) This is a short time in geological terms. However, life has not begun once since. Therefore something either actively created life once it became possible or something actively keeps new forms of life from springing up.
It should be fairly obvious that, given the fact that life has occupied every conceiveable niche on this planet, that any 'new life' will be effectively prevented from developing. In short, that 'something' that actively keeps new forms of life from springing up is the already established life.
Intelligent Design posits that life changed very slowly immediately after life began, then a profusion of new life forms came into existence during the cambrian period, and life has changed very slowly since.
Ah yes...the Cambrian Explosion argument...again, bunk. The only reason the Cambrian Explosion looks like an explosion at all is because this particular time period is when animals started to evolve hard structures such as teeth and shells....structures that fossilize easily and are easily identifible. There are plenty of Precambrian fossils, however, that developed in the same way and that argue against a sudden Cambrian explosion. Simply put, the "Cambrian Explosion" wasn't an explosion at all.
By the way, the general tone of your post is sarcastic and demeaning, and makes an excellent example the close mindedness of some proponents of Evolution.
I'm sorry you percieve my demand for a rational argument to support your "theory" as demeaning. I'm also sorry you percieve those who do not abandon rationality in favor of 'God did it' at the slightest pretext as 'close minded'.
I would like to say something about your use of scare quotes around the word "theory." I think you'll find, if you look, that a theory is defined as a set of statements having two subsets--the set of statements that are acceptable (s.k.a True,) and those that aren't (s.k.a False.) Thus Intelligent Design easily meets the definition of theory, and your use of scare quotes is unwarranted.
Your definition of the word theory is disingenuous in the extreme...and sadly, par for the course for ID proponents.
Here is the actual definition of theory, from Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary [reference.com]:
QTAP (Score:3, Informative)
This and other reasonings that somehow hint at intelligent designers, fall under the anthropic principle [wikipedia.org]. The physical realm around us will by necessity seem perfectly fine-tuned to support us, because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to examine it. And if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory holds true, then there exists an infinite number of universes, of which an infinite number is incapable of supporting our kind of life.
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB301.html [talkorigins.org]
You're a font of creationist talking-points.
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:5, Informative)
In science, all knowledge is provisional, so it is belaboring the obvious to say, "The earth orbits around the sun maybe", or "F = MA maybe." This was one of the most telling points that the judge made in the Dover trial. Because all science is provisional, attaching a disclaimer to evolution, and not to other statements of scientific knowledge, gives the false impression that evolution is somehow more subject to doubt than other scientific knowledge.
Look how science is taught, with the assumption that everything written in the textbooks are true.
Every science course I ever took began with an explanation of the scientific method.
Look how people will base their scientific careers and life-work on things that may or may not be correct.
Every scientist does that. So what? It is the only workable way of doing science that anybody has ever found. The people who go into science are the ones who find that fundamental uncertainty exciting and inspiring. It is not what is known that attracts people to science; it is what is not known. Those who are uncomfortable with living among the shifting sands of scientific knowledge should go into fields such as mathematics, where true proof exists, or into religion, where faith does not require evidence.
I have the Old Testement/New Testement/Koran/"insert any religous text", which is a set of recorded assumptions. I base theories from these assumptions. From observation of human interactions and from human history I think that the validity of these assumptions remain true. Am I a scientist performing science?
No because you are leaving out the part about continually seeking ways to test and challenge these assumptions. For a scientist, nothing is more exciting that finding a way to challenge and test something that he or she has always previously been forced to take as an assumption.
Re:Proudly secular? (Score:1, Informative)
It is also a requirement to swear allegiance to the monarch on entering parliament and therefore an oath of allegiance is effectively sworn to the Church of England. You can not logically swear allegiance to somebody who's primary duty is to be "defender of the Faith" without yourself swearing allegiance to that Faith. It is possible to do what Benn used to do and state "under duress and protest I hereby..." but one of the reasons why Sinn Fein won't take their seats in Parliament is that oath.
You might also want to check out how many Bishops sit in the House of Lords and can vote against/for Government bills. The Church of England also has its own synod which is recognised in UK law as being rather special - you might want to do some reading up on it.
In addition to all that, off the top of my head, no member of the Privy Council is non-CoE. That means no ex-Prime Minister, any current MP who is referred to as "the Right Hon." as opposed to just "the Hon.", and a whole shedload of other hangers-on.
The idea that Britain is a secular country is as ludicrous as suggesting the deep South of the US "once had a thing about Christianity, but it all got forgotten ages back".
It is also a myth that "most" Brits aren't Christian, and an even bigger myth that to be a Christian you must be ignorant: it just means you believe a particular guy was Son of God, it doesn't require you to have a literal interpretation of the Old Testament regardless.
And can I just point out that stating that because there is no evidence it can't possibly be true that it exists is a ludicrous proposition for educated people to take: there was no evidence for quantum physics until the last century, but it didn't prevent it from going on. I'm not a Christian, but I really despise the "better than you" attitude around here.
I hate religious discussions on Slashdot - it just betrays how fricking ignorant, smug, self-satisfied and prejudicial everybody around here is.
Re:Close Friends (Score:5, Informative)
Every fucking time there's a discussion about religion, somebody trots out the "God does not play dice" quote...
I don't mind if you want to argue that religious conviction has no clear connection with intelligence or lack thereof, but leave Einstein and his quote about gambling gods out of it. Einstein did not believe in the Christian God.
Stop misinterpreting Einstein's "dice" quote. (Score:2, Informative)
Weird... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Et tu, Britannia? (Score:3, Informative)
Darwin proposed one: identification of a feature in one species that exists solely for the benefit of members of a different species.
I think it was Stepehn Jay Gould who proposed another observation: finding the remains of a modern chicken in precambrian rocks.
But this was all hashed out and decided in the first half of the 20th century. Evolution is science. Evolution is a fact (in the sense of the history of life on earth, i.e. common descent), and a theory (mutation and selection, genetic drift).
Re:But the beginning of life doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed. And molecular biologists have spent plenty of time working out exactly what those paths, both in specific and in general, are. Interestingly enough, living systems are a lot more plastic than most people give them credit for. Heck, there are 6 major types of human aorta morphology, all of which work about as well as the others. And the way this stuff grows is fasincatingly NOT like a strict blueprint, but rather like a recipe in which different ingredients can affect the outcome but don't necessarily turn the whole thing to mush right away.
"The conventional dogma is that this occurs through a multiplicity of small changes (we have observed such small changes in real experiments - I have seen such data from my own lab), each of which gradually moves the population (genetic drift). The problem is that whilst this is a cosy theory, there is little remenant of this."
I'm not sure what you mean by this. There is plenty of remnant of this. Not only do we have the rare examples of diatoms and snail shells showing that these changes, while they may not move at a steady pace, do generally happen gradually, but we have plenty of molecular evidence that the divergences we see happened because of natural selection and lots of mutation, both of which are characteristic processes that leave very specific marks where they've done their work.
"We should now have more species than at any time ever,"
Er, ??? Why? Are you doubting that countless species go extinct, sometimes in massive numbers? Although, it must be said: it seems like we do have one of the most diverse set of species in the history of the earth around today. We're currently in the process of killing off a good portion of it, but the globe is crawling with life in every corner, and again: species are more morphologicaly diverse than almost ever before that I can think of.
"and species should not be distinct but a continuum (if we take the slow steady mountain climb approach advocated by the likes of Dawkins)."
Not if some die out, which they very often do. But as a matter of fact we do have many continuums as well: ring species, the way hybridization has all sorts of varying levels instead of a bright line, etc.
"This is not something that makes sense but is very nice for putting very long timescales on things. Burst evolution, where dramatic environmental changes radically alter the genetic pressure on organisms whilst providing the circumstances to allow genetic change can be observed experimentally but, being unpredictable, throws all the happy 'slow steady climb' molecular clocks out of the window."
You don't know much about how molecular clocks work if you think that they don't have ways to compensate for differences in evolutionary change. Of course, you probably _definately_ don't understand how they work if you think they primarily measure rates of evolutionary change, when in fact they measure the fairly constant rates of mutation in particular sorts of non-coding sections of genetic material, controlled to detect error and changes via statistical methods.
"There are also distinct problems with establishing mechanisms for major events - evolution of sex, evolution of DNA duplication, evolution of completely novel genes etc."
The evolution of novel genes is so well documented that it's absurd to include on this list. The other two are indeed very hot questions in biology, but the problems are largely that we don't have enough evidence to determine which of many many different possibilities were the one actual mechanism. That's not at all the same thing as having a problem seeing how they could have happened at ALL. An inability to know where certain comets were in the distant past does not const
Re:Close Friends (Score:2, Informative)
Given that he came from a Jewish family, that's not exactly a news flash.