You Keep Using That Word, "Theory,"

[Mythsaje]

but I don't think it means what you think it means.

Okay, evolution deniers, I've had just about all of your willful blindness as I can take. You say evolution's only a theory, so it's not really proven science. A Theory is as "proven" as it gets. Acting as though it means the same thing as some yutz--like, maybe, YOU, saying "I have a theory that we're going to have ham for dinner tonight" shows a remarkable ignorance not only of science, but of critical thinking in general.

I had this conversation the other day. With a coworker. I mentioned "the kind of nuts who don't believe in evolution" and then discovered that she, specifically, was that kind of nut. I'll admit, I felt like a bit of a jerk. For all of five seconds. I simply said "Huh" and went about my business.

So she asks me, "What does that mean, Huh? You sound like you don't approve." (Or something similar). She was fishing for more than a single grunt in response.

So I reply "I'm just not sure I've ever met someone who didn't believe in evolution." You skeptics and what not say what you will about pagans, at least they believe in science. They just believe in other things BESIDES science. I'm agnostic, but I have a lot of friends (and a wife) who are pagan. One in particular I'd just love to see in a debate here, as a matter of fact. I wouldn't care who "won." I'd just like to see it.

But I digress. After I say that, she's silent for a little while, then started in about it "only being a theory." I sighed, and thought about how to counter this. I paid some attention in High School science classes, but I don't remember off-hand how they defined them. If I remember correctly, "theory" means something that's been proven. It's as "hard" as science gets sometimes, given that science, unlike superstition, allows for new information to change accepted assumptions.

I told her as much, saying that science isn't the same as mathematics, where 2+2=4 and that's it. The term "theory" is science's (and scientists') way of saying "there are very few absolutes, but this is what looks to be the case." Our medical sciences are, to a great extent, based upon the theory of evolution--particularly germ theory. We're able to combat germs because we understand how they're likely to react to certain stimuli--based on what we understand of how they evolve. If evolution wasn't a fact as well as a "theory," we wouldn't be able to manipulate them the way we do.

Closer to home, I pointed out, is the simple existence of dogs. Man's best friend and all that. A creature we have been deliberately breeding (evolving) as WE chose for the better part of several thousand (who knows how many?)years. All those remarkably different creatures are, in fact, nearly identical genetically. And only a hand-span away from the wolves that spawned them.

Adaptation and Natural Selection are observable facts. Our understanding of how it works may not be complete, but no credible scientist has any doubt that evolution occurs and is, in fact, occurring around us all the time. I realize this flies in the face of the whole "God Created Man" thing, but, seriously, do you want your science to be based on faith and dogma rather than observable phenomenon? Would you trust your safety to an airplane built like a cross with no consideration for lift and drag and other physical laws based on the idea that "faith" would help it fly? Would you bet your faith against the laws of motion? I don't care HOW pious you are, you can't evade the laws of physics.

So the way you deal with the seeming dichotomy between your "divinely inspired" book and real world science we use and depend on every day is to deny the science. Because you know, deep down, which you should actually trust. Science has no agenda and has built millions of tools that have shaped our world and continue to do so. Religion and "faith" possess the agenda of whoever's interpreting the documentation and has never once, by itself, added to the sum of human knowledge with regards to the physical laws of the universe.

You get on a plane and fly because science told them how to make a machine that could fly. You pick up a phone and call your wife because science told them how to project information through the air in radio waves. You climb in your car and motor down to church because science told them how to burn fossil fuels to create combustion and create the horseless carriage.

Science. You can sit and pray to be instantly transported somewhere else for as long as you like. Faith can't do that. Science, on the other hand, can tell you why it might and might not be possible.

Science doesn't demand faith. It demands critical thought. It requires questioning previous assumptions. Science grows and changes as our understanding of the universe expands.

Religion? Not so much.

There's a reason the Bible and other holy books don't really describe the world, the solar system, the galaxy, atomic structure, or anything else that is actually observable. Because the people that wrote them had no more information about the nature of the universe than anyone else did. The idea that a omnipotent, omniscient deity had even the smallest input in any of them seems, well, ludicrous.

But people can believe anything they damn well please, as long as they don't try to pass laws meant for the rest of us based on their narrow view of the world.


I have to add that my new-found annoyance about this subject was raised by the inanity of the following comment, made by a parent and a teacher in middle of the Missouri High School Band tee-shirt controversy.


“I was disappointed with the image on the shirt.” She said. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school."


Yeah--who'd want a high school associated with science, right?


Here's the whole article, btw... http://www.sedaliademocrat.com/news/0px-18740-span-font.html


They are the 21st Century equivalent of flat-Earthers and are just too blind to notice. So many fools, so little time.

[sakabatou]

1. The stupid! It buuuuuurns!

[AuntPatsy]

2. I love your response to this woman..do you mind if I use some of it....?

[Mythsaje]

3. Not at all...

Feel free. :)

[vixengrl]

4. I'd never actually confronted a Creationist, either.

I know I've come across one or two. Just not confronted them.

But the problem is one part information: as in, the creationist might not be informed enough about science to have a proper argument with, and one part: need, as in, the creationist believes in creationism because one needs to separate from the observable world, and experience humanity through the mythic lens of being the unique creation of a higher being.

Either type of creationist is difficult to speak with. The first is difficult to speak with because we would lack a language in common. I could ask provoking questions, but just as a horse can be led to water and not drink, a person can be led to truth, but not be made to think--just so the unscientific-minded would just be bewildered and decide they only have faith. For the latter, who needs creationism as a cornerstone of a belief-system regarding their particular belief in lieu of knowledge, remaining resolute against the evolutionist argument is an article of faith, a territory in play in the battle for their soul. Standing firm against the Darwinian menace is a sign of purity. It's a wall difficult to break through.

It's like trying to argue that Marx had a point about history or that Reagan wasn't actually a "great" president to your average conservative. The idea os so heretical, the conversation can't even start.

[Mythsaje]

5. I get the feeling this person considers herself fairly intelligent and educated...

Her response was "well, maybe some things evolve."

[vixengrl]

6. Some, but not people?

I think the idea that humans evolved is the sticking point for creationists, as in: they'll allow micro-evolution in the coloration of a swallow or the design of a butterfly wing or even a lizard's eye, but resist the long-term evolution of hominids. Because people are specially made in God's image, or something like that.

[Mythsaje]

7. Right... whatever the hell THAT means.

God's a bipedal male, then? With all the same organs and what not as we have? Then why does our appendix go kaput all the time? Did we get the defective one? But some don't. So SOME of us got the defective one? Who's in "God's Image" and who's "spare parts?"
I don't usually argue religion because, eh, it doesn't usually end well. I won't argue, I'll just ask questions until their heads implode.

[Iggo]

15. I worked with one (a creationist, that is).

She asked me once "do you believe in evolution?", and she emphasised the words "believe in" in such a way that I figured she had a ready a-ha response. So I told her I don't believe in "believe in." And then I walked away. Not a victory by any stretch. But I think I may have escaped the trap.

[Mythsaje]

22. I'd probably counter with "do you believe in UFOs?"

That's always a fun slider to throw a creationist. :evilgrin:

[Iggo]

33. Oh hey, that's a good one.

:rofl:

[krispos42]

8. Scientists create a theory and then try to disprove it

If you can't disprove the theory, it has credibility. If you can, your theory needs to be reworked. And then you test the reworked theory.

Of course it's a lot more complex than that... your test has to be documented and peer-reviewed, and of course there are various ways of testing one aspect or another.

But that's the general idea.

[lysosome]

9. Gravity is "just" a theory.

You won't fall off a, say, 12 story building if you have faith.
Tell that to christians.
You just might get rid of some creationists.

***

Ok, my pet peeve. No one really disbelieves in evolution. They disbelieve in decent with modification to the extent that it eventually causes different species (cause god created them all in a week, you know).
Now here's the catch. If there is not enough time for creatures to evolve, then there is no decent without modification. Simple enough. If there is enough time, it's pretty much unavoidable. So, the real question for these nutjobs is : How old is the earth. When they say 7,000 years, they are no longer just creationists, they don't believe in geology. You know, the science that gives them OIL.

Now here's where the right just gets loony :crazy:

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

That's right. The earth, you see, is only 7000 years, so oil couldn't POSSIBLY be the work of hundreds of millions of years of geology. The earth naturally makes oil, you see. So we'll never run out.

It's a right winger's wet dream. Look for it to be taught to your kids in school real soon. Along with the fact that global warming is a myth.
http://people-press.org/report/280/little-consensus-on-global-warming

[Quantess]

16. Your mind is amazing.

[Quantess]

10. Great read.

[hfojvt]

11. you are wrong about the word theory

and the nonsense about how science > religion is just as ridiculous as the idea the knowledge > widsom.

Rah, rah for science. It gave us the telephone and the jet plane. Hmm, seems to me that lots of things were invented/discovered before there was a scientific method as such. It depends on how you are gonna define science. Were the Greeks doing it? Not the same way Bacon was doing it.

Seems to me that science has given us B-1 bombers and neutron bombs too, but they are sorta like God that way. They take credit for all the good technological advances and blame the others on Satan or sinful man.

Most people who object to 'evolution' are certainly not objection to the readily proven part - that a species will adapt to the environment over time. Moths will change color and finches beaks will get shorter or longer. But however much a chicken adapts to its environment, will it ever become a duck? Even that is a superficial objection because the real problem is with Oparin, which is hardly a settled fact and probably never will be since it is a theory about what happened 3 billion years ago or so.

[lysosome]

12. but moths don't change color.

They stay the color they are. If they blend with the back ground, then they tend not go get eaten and they grow up to have baby moths that color. The individual animals don't evolve. They are what they are. If that works out in their environment, then they just reproduce and it's the population that evolves. If the gradual changes favor the environment, then that's what the population will evolve to.

As far as will a chicken evolved into a duck, well... the marsupial wolf looks something like a wolf - but it's not remotely related to a wolf at all. It's just that the environment favored a top predator. Form follows function.

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

As far as B-1 bombers, science is observation. What we do with the observation is technology. There's a difference.

[Mythsaje]

13. No I'm not...

But you can continue to think so if it makes you happy.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

14. Nope, he's right.

Theory doesn't just mean a guess, like the Creationists like to claim.

"Hmm, seems to me that lots of things were invented/discovered before th"ere was a scientific method as such."

Well, let's see... there was the sail... and, um, the wheel... You know what, seems to me that things weren't all that advanced before the scientific method. We've made more advances after the scientific method than all the thousands of years before.

"They take credit for all the good technological advances and blame the others on Satan or sinful man."

I'm not sure what the scientific method has to do with Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

"Most people who object to 'evolution' are certainly not objection to the readily proven part - that a species will adapt to the environment over time."

The part that creationists object to is the fact that all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor. Crazy fuckers.

[hfojvt]

19. I did not say that it meant a guess

only that it does not mean the same thing as a 'proven fact'. Some theories have lots of evidence backing them up and some do not.

Whoops. It seems I may have been mistaken. At least the biology textbook distinguishes between theories and hypotheses. In my memory from my astronomy classes a million years ago, it seemed to me that some pretty shaky things were called theories. There was the theory of continuous creation and then there was the space-virus theory of the origin of life. At least I remembered them being called theories.

I think the objection to evolution is more fundamental than just a common ancestor. Although it is very typical for the people who call others who disbelieve certain things 'crazy fuckers' to be unable to prove themselves that what they believe is true. Can you prove that all life evolved from a common ancestor?

As for advances. We have some really cool and amazing stuff. Computers with gigs of RAM. Ipods. DVDs. Internets. But I am not sure how many 'advances' we have made.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

32. You can't remember your own classes, yet you still pontificate?

Back in your astronomy class you would have learned about the theory of gravity. Which is a fact.

"Can you prove that all life evolved from a common ancestor?"

Pff, yeah. Welcome to the last 160 years of modern biology. Jesus fucking Christ.

[BlooInBloo]

17. Just. Plain. Dumb.

[hfojvt]

20. I may have fallen some from my 680, 800, 790 GRE scores

I sorta got smoked by a college algebra text a month ago. I guess I have forgotten a lot of the useless sh*t that I used to be good at. What a drag it is getting old.

I think I prefer kindness to intelligence anyway. Clearly, you disagree.

I used to think that smart people were like Isaac Asimov, Albert Einstein and most of my compatriots from advanced chemistry - really smart and also really decent and copacetic people.

Later I met more smart people and smarter people and that beautiful theory was destroyed by a barrage of cruel facts. So it goes.

I really need that quote from Lasher in Player Piano. I guess I will have to buy that book shortly.

[Mythsaje]

23. There are many kinds of intelligence...

Some of them aren't very friendly. Hell, some aren't very USER friendly.

[BlooInBloo]

25. Decent scores... Particularly the last...

assuming it's from the logic games days, and not the writing sample thing they have nowadays.

[hfojvt]

27. January 2000

Probably explains it. The Y2K bug messed up their program. I got similar scores in 1987 before I went to graduate school except that my verbal scores were about 100 points lower.

But in 1987 I had an advantage because I had a book of logic puzzles I was doing for fun in the months before the test - without knowing that part of the test was gonna be logic puzzles. And in 2000 I had just about killed myself the day before the test replacing my water heater.

Ah, if only life could be as easy for me as a standardized test.

[BlooInBloo]

28. "Ah, if only life could be as easy for me as a standardized test."...

Quoted for truth.

[BlooInBloo]

18. The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ought to be required reading for high school graduation....

It would be sooooo helpful in getting rid of soooo much idiocy regarding what science *is* (on our side as well as theirs).

[Mythsaje]

21. Science is the search for knowledge

where religion is the assumption of knowledge.

[BlooInBloo]

31. Some think that bit more by way of detail can be said.

[Odin2005]

34. I think some stuff by Karl Popper would be better.

Kuhn is more sociology than epistemology, and I don't think Kuhn is completely correct, anyway. Karl Popper's notions of Falsifiability as the basis of Science is the root of modern Philosophy of Science. Having a good grounding in the Falsifiability principle will do a lot to help people not to become victims of confirmation bias and superstitious thinking.

[BlooInBloo]

37. (facepalm)

Sure, if you want to know what science *isn't*.

[Taitertots]

24. I want a shirt that says

"Creationism isn't even a theory"

[madokie]

26. +1

[The Animator]

29. When a scientist says theory...

There is a natural progression in the scientific method... an evolution you might say.
Much like how a bill becomes a law. A Theory doesn't start off as a Theory, it starts as a hypothesis.

Maybe that's what's been missing... we never had a School House Rocks song called "How a Hypothesis becomes a Theory".

A hypothesis is essentially, an educated guess that is derived from an observation on the natural world.

Observation: "There is very little plant life the a desert. There is aslo very little water in the desert too. I wonder if these two phenomena are somehow related..."

Developed Hypothesis: "The absence of plant life in this desert must be the reason that it never rains here... I think the plants send out a signal too the clouds, and when there are enough plants together in one place they will call to the clouds and the clouds will arrive and it will rain."

Experiment: "I have bought hundreds upon hundreds of plants from a nearby greenhouse and have planted all of them in this desert... I have the entire process on film, so that the experiment maybe duplicated when my hypothesis is proven.... I now await the plant's signal, and await the arrival of the rain clouds in response..."

...

"Um it is now twelve days later... I think it's safe to assume the clouds aren't coming... maybe these plants do not know about the signal because they were raised in captivity... all the plants have died... I'm an idiot and it's all on tape."

Experiment 2: "I have taken hundreds of plants from a forest on the other side of the mountains, it rains there almost every day, so I think I got some really good 'signal plants' this time... I now await the thunderclouds..."

...

"Fuck! Still nothing. It's only been eight days and all of these plants are already dead... Where the hell are all the Goddamn clouds! It's like the clouds don't even react. It's like they don't even respond to the plant signal..."


Experiment 47: "I have finally arrived another hypothesis... oddly enough it just sort of came to me while I was delusional from extreme dehydration... Maybe the clouds aren't defendant on the existence of plants, maybe plants are defendant on the existence of SHADE! Of course! That has to be it! I'll just get hundreds of plants from this green house and stick them in a warehouse with no windows!! I'm brilliant Nobel Prize here I come..."


Experiment 1743: "Okay... I think I finally got it hammered down... Plants need Water... Soil... AND Sunlight... all at the same time... in order to survive... Holy Hell! Who ever would have thought of that?! I'm running the experiment now..."

"I can't fucking believe it... they're still alive... most of the plants... there still alive! It's been over a month and there still fucking green! Whooohoooo! Eureeka! At last!"

Now to publish my findings...


"Well, scientists all around the world have replicated my experiment thousands upon thousands of times. Each time, it has produced consistently predictable results .. a consensus has been reached.. my little hypothesis is being upgraded... to a THEORY!!! Can you believe it!!! I mean, that's as solid as it gets! Scientifically set in stone!... I mean there's always the remote possibility that someone other researcher could come up with another hypothesis to challenge my Theory... but they'd have to preform an experiment to prove it... or over a thousand experiments... just like I did... But for now... my place in scientific history is secure with the 'The Animators Theory of How to Get a Whole Lot of Fucking Plants Not to Die'."


Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Trial and error, Publication, Replication, Predictable Results, Consensus, THEORY!!

[TransitJohn]

30. Intelligent falling

explains the theory of gravity.....it's just a theory.

[Odin2005]

35. in popular language "theory" has become bastardize t mean "hypothesis" or "conjecture"

Which is a big problem.

[windoe]

36. We evolve even in one lifetime

as we learn we can change the way we perceive the world. If we allow ourselves. It seems even this one premise is lost on those that mistake their ego construct as the entirety of their being.