Real Science Radio CRSQ (Vol 43, Num 1)

[Yorzhik]

The words were originally used in this thread by bob b. Why dont you spend some time reading Johnny's post #114 and trying to understand his reasoning rather than doing the standard fundy thing of arguing over a dictionary definition.

One word was used by aharvey and one by bobb. I read the posts completely.

Again, Jukia proves himself a waste.

You know Jukia, if you want to make the snide comments, you would help yourself by making a thoughtful response at least occasionally.

 

[aharvey]

One word was used by aharvey and one by bobb. I read the posts completely.

You might want to reread, then. Bob b was in fact the first to use both "improvement" (post 103) and "advanced" (post 110) in this subthread.

Again, Jukia proves himself a waste.

You know Jukia, if you want to make the snide comments, you would help yourself by making a thoughtful response at least occasionally.

I don't know, though, as your responses to Johnny's excellent post so far seem to have nothing to do with what he actually said, in which case, Jukia's suggestion that you reread it makes sense to me.

 

[Johnny]

No, these would be synonyms for the most part.

Hi Yorzhik. They are perhaps synonyms, but I was speaking of ther individual applications to organisms--not of their relationship to each other. "Advancement" and "Improvement" are not absolute, they are a determination made by comparing organisms. But in comparing two very different organisms adapted for two very different niches, the terms are rendered almost meaningless.

 

[Jukia]

If we are not an improvement then we are not any more advanced.

:

Yorzhik: This from bob b. Johnny was responding to that I think. It just seemed to me that you did not take the time to read Johnny's response. Johnny's comments were related to the substance of the underlying issues rather than a dispute over the Merriam Webster definition of the words.

 

[Morphy]

And you are confounding those meanings. No concept of evolution considers human beings to be improvements over protocells! The notion of evolutionary "improvements," by which you really mean "relative advantages," is something that applies within populations, and has relevance to the outcome of interspecific competition, but I don't see how it applies across lineages over time. Resistance to malaria gives one phenotype an advantage over other phenotypes in the same population under certain conditions. Placental mammals had traits that gave them certain competitive advantages over sympatric marsupials. Human beings would be at a decided disadvantage under the environmental conditions in which early bacteria thrived, don't you think?

And, just to remind everyone, human beings are not the only pinnacle of evolutionary success, despite the "protocell to human" type of label that creationists, and only creationists, like to use. Every organism alive today, according to current evolutionary thought, is descended from that original protocell line, and it would probably be helpful to keep in mind that we're not talking only about "protocell to human," but also "protocell to dandelion," protocell to chanterelle," "protocell to bacterium," and so on. But these lineages are not completely independent of each other; that is, humans and dandelions didn't spring independently from the same protocell ancestor. The simplistic "protocell to protestant" labelling does a great job of obfuscating the issue.

That's undoubtly true.

When I understood evolution (it took me some time since at the beginning I didn't agree with the theory) I realized it dethrones the man. The man, according to evolution, is nothing but just one of many species (this is really sad and depressing but true).

According to evolution the man is as successful as for example human parasites and viruses (the more people the more copies of viruses). And it is true if we agree the most successful species is the one which is able to replicate in as many copies as possible.

If we say the most successful is the most intelligent species (what doesn't have to be true) then the man is the prize winner.

 

[Morphy]

He didn't. I deduced it from his claim that humans are not an improvement over protocells (whatever the heck they might be). If we are not an improvement then we are not any more advanced.

But then again evolution is not very logical anyway so perhaps it is futile to use logic with regard to things that an evolutionist says.

Perhaps he meant "reproductive success" which would I suppose imply that anything that has not gone extinct is a success and hence on equal footing: nothing is an "improvement" over anything else so nothing is more advanced either. Sort of a socialist's dreamworld.

Do you suppose there is a correlation between belief in evolution and belief in socialism?
:think:

One has to master courage to admit according to evolution man is nothing special.

In fact such belief may encourage somebody to think if the man is not special, why should we take care of him more than for an ape, for example.

My answer is simple: since I prefer to live safely and wealthy I prefer to live among christians than socialists and that is why I have to value human being higher.

 

[Morphy]

Guys,

You may call it a surrender, but I'd like to end this topic up.

The reason I want to end it up is simple: I don't give up on evolution; quite reversely - the longer I debate you the more certain I'm the theory of evolution is true.

The reason I want to end up this debate is I realized evolution undermines (I hope it is right verb for what I mean) Christianity. Although I am an atheist I believe it is much better to live among people who fear God's punishment (the crime rate is lower and people are nicer to each other).

Thus, I do not surrender, but I don't want to undermine Christianity. If somebody wants to keep debating me, send me a private message.

BTW: if there are any confirmed evolutionists crossing fingers for me: sorry guys, Christianity should prevail unless we want to end up in moral gutter.

 

[bob b]

One has to master courage to admit according to evolution man is nothing special.

Rather than "courage" I would call it "doublethink" (courtesy of George Orwell's 1984).

 

[Morphy]

Rather than "courage" I would call it "doublethink" (courtesy of George Orwell's 1984).

It's not doublethink. It's courage to say you're nothing special.

Doublethink is when you think something and say something else while I say what I think.

 

[Yorzhik]

You might want to reread, then. Bob b was in fact the first to use both "improvement" (post 103) and "advanced" (post 110) in this subthread.

No, Bobb's use of the one word was in direct response to your using the other word, directly.

If you want to go to the first times in the thread the words were used, it was by Johnny in post 11 (naturally, talking about the improvement/advantage of having a debilitating desease), and BobE responded with the other word in post 17 directly to that argument.

 

[bob b]

Do you suppose theres a correlation between belief in evolution and intelligence?

Since evolutionists frequently have their own private definitions for common words, and since these definitions generally are not the same as ordinary people use, perhaps you should define what you mean by "intelligence".

In my mind I would think it might be related to the ability to think rationally for oneself and hence avoid adopting irrational ideas like human beings are nothing "special".

 

[Morphy]

Since evolutionists frequently have their own private definitions for common words, and since these definitions generally are not the same as ordinary people use, perhaps you should define what you mean by "intelligence".

In my mind I would think it might be related to the ability to think rationally for oneself and hence avoid adopting irrational ideas like human beings are nothing "special".

There are various evolutionists like there are various Christians.

But as far as I'm concerned I would define intelligence as an ability to cope with problems using one's brain rather than muscles/organs.

 

[bob b]

There are various evolutionists like there are various Christians.

But as far as I'm concerned I would define intelligence as an ability to cope with problems using one's brain rather than muscles/organs.

"There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."

 

[aharvey]

No, Bobb's use of the one word was in direct response to your using the other word, directly.

If you want to go to the first times in the thread the words were used, it was by Johnny in post 11 (naturally, talking about the improvement/advantage of having a debilitating desease), and BobE responded with the other word in post 17 directly to that argument.

Yorzhik, it's not like you to nitpick, but hey, in the message where you justify your odd contribution to this thread, you don't refer to Johnny's first use, you attribute them to bobb and me.

And I'm surprised that you're continuing to settle on this totally irrelevant part of the discussion and not commenting on the actual issue, which is what the notion of "improvement" (or "advanced", or whatever you want to call it) means when you're comparing organisms at different times in different habitats and niches.

 

[bob b]

Yorzhik, it's not like you to nitpick, but hey, in the message where you justify your odd contribution to this thread, you don't refer to Johnny's first use, you attribute them to bobb and me.

And I'm surprised that you're continuing to settle on this totally irrelevant part of the discussion and not commenting on the actual issue, which is what the notion of "improvement" (or "advanced", or whatever you want to call it) means when you're comparing organisms at different times in different habitats and niches.

Hey alan, how about taking a moment away from your important "actual issue" and telling us whether you would agree with some evolutionists here that "human beings are nothing special"?

 

[aharvey]

Hey alan, how about taking a moment away from your important "actual issue" and telling us whether you would agree with some evolutionists here that "human beings are nothing special"?

bob b, since you asked nicely, and since it's apparent that you have no interest in discussing issues unless you bring them up or think you can use them to your advantage... Actually, this article has some interesting insights, and it's a fair characterization of my take on the subject:


January 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor

Why I'm Happy I Evolved
By OLIVIA JUDSON


London

IF chimpanzees observed New Year's Day, they would have much to reflect on. In 2005, they joined humans, chickens and mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete genomes have been sequenced.

What would they make of this news, I wonder? Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

Just think: the Indus River dolphin doesn't sleep as you or I do, or indeed as most mammals, for several hours at once. Instead, it takes microsleeps, naps that last for a few seconds, like a driver dozing at the wheel.

Or consider this: a few days after its conception, a pig embryo has become a filament that is about a yard long.

Or: the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast.

It's not that I have a fetish for obscure facts. It's that small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature's infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable.

For example, if you were to discover a new species and you told me that the male is much bigger than the female, I would tell you what the mating system is likely to be: males fight each other for access to females. Or if you discover that the male's testicles make up a large part of his weight, I can tell you that the females in his species consort with several males at a time.

Suppose you find that a particular bacterium lives exclusively in the gullets of leeches and helps them digest blood. Then I can tell you how that bacterium's genome is likely to differ from those of its free-living cousins; among other changes, the genome will be smaller, and it will have lost sets of genes that are helpful for living free but useless for living inside another being.

Because a cell is a kind of factory that produces proteins, and because proteins can have a variety of components, some of which are cheaper to synthesize than others, you might expect that proteins that are mass produced are made from cheaper components than proteins that are constructed only occasionally. And you'd be right.

The patterns are everywhere. Mammals that feed on ants and termites have typically evolved long, thin noses and long, sticky tongues. A virus that is generally passed from mother to child will tend to make its host less sick than one that readily jumps from one host to another via a cough or a sneeze.

When I was in school, I learned none of this. Biology was a subject that seemed as exciting as a clump of cotton wool. It was a dreary exercise in the memorization and regurgitation of apparently unconnected facts. Only later did I learn about evolution and how it transforms biology from that mass of cotton wool into a magnificent tapestry, a tapestry we can contemplate and begin to understand.

Some people want to think of humans as the product of a special creation, separate from other living things. I am not among them; I am glad it is not so. I am proud to be part of the riot of nature, to know that the same forces that produced me also produced bees, giant ferns and microbes that live at the bottom of the sea.

For me, the knowledge that we evolved is a source of solace and hope. I find it a relief that plagues and cancers and wasp larvae that eat caterpillars alive are the result of the impartial - and comprehensible - forces of evolution rather than the caprices of a deity.

More than that, I find that in viewing ourselves as one species out of hundreds of millions, we become more remarkable, not less so. No other animal that I have heard of can live so peaceably in such close quarters with so many individuals that are unrelated. No other animal routinely bothers to help the sick and the dying, or tries to save those hurt in an earthquake or flood.

Which is not to say that we are all we might wish to be. But in putting ourselves into our place in nature, in comparing ourselves with other species, we have a real hope of reaching a better understanding, and appreciation, of ourselves.

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

 

[GuySmiley]

I find it a relief that plagues and cancers and wasp larvae that eat caterpillars alive are the result of the impartial - and comprehensible - forces of evolution rather than the caprices of a deity.

Is this the only other option to the random forces of evolution? I can't seem to place it in my mind but I swear I've seen this topic discussed on TOL before . . .

 

[aharvey]

Is this the only other option to the random forces of evolution? I can't seem to place it in my mind but I swear I've seen this topic discussed on TOL before . . .

I don't know the answer to your question. As a biologist I would say that yes, there is an option besides the "random forces of evolution," namely the highly non-random forces that drive evolution, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean! Taking an admittedly wild guess, though, could you be thinking of something like "the reason wasps eat caterpillars alive is because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge"?

 

[GuySmiley]

I don't know the answer to your question. As a biologist I would say that yes, there is an option besides the "random forces of evolution," namely the highly non-random forces that drive evolution, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean! Taking an admittedly wild guess, though, could you be thinking of something like "the reason wasps eat caterpillars alive is because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge"?

She says that she'd rather have nature responsible for diseases than believe in a God that would cause them (basically). It seems that she doesn't consider that there could be a creationist God that does not give people cancer, nor did He create cancer. It looks like Calvinism has struck again! I know you don't hang out in the theology parts of TOL too much, but Calvinism vs Free Will is a pretty big topic here. Its funny that the "caprices of deity" is what she objects too. On that point I'll join her!

 

[GuySmiley]

Taking an admittedly wild guess, though, could you be thinking of something like "the reason wasps eat caterpillars alive is because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge"?

Oh, as for this, no, that would be a really weird belief and I'm not weird. If you don't believe me, just ask me.