Good news - evolution now accepted by majority of Americans!

roscoe

Well-known member
Well, we are no longer down with Turkey, and are approaching the numbers from the rest of the industrialized world, although still lagging. Still, 54% is a majority, and for the first time!

Unfortunately, only 34% of conservative Republicans accept evolutionary science, but it is progress! Up from 8% in 1988:


Yay science!
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Yeah, sure.
Stuff evolves.
We're all just meaningless blobs of tissue.
Morals and ethics are just meaningless terms.
Just do what feels good and screw everyone else.
Evolution makes SUCH an excellent base philosophy for a society... .

Science speaks to what is, not what ought. Check out David Hume's 'Naturalistic Fallacy'. I am not aware of any scientist out there arguing for a morality based on evolutionary theory. At least, not since the 19th century eugenicists like Herbert Spencer (and he was a philosopher who misread Darwin, anyway).

However, you ignore evolution at your peril. There are biological reasons why we try to avoid giving too many antibiotics - MERSA is a real problem, for example, and it is the product of evolutionary change in bacterial strains of streptococcus. The wide-spread use of antibiotics in livestock production has some significant potential problems for humans in the future for similar reasons. And, of course, COVID, especially the Delta variant.

Human anatomy is the result of evolutionary change from ape-like ancestors, which explains why we have bad spines and appendices prone to infection, but good overhead reach. It also explains why we like sugar so much.

But also, behaviorally - there are reasons rooted in evolutionary biology why, the world over, men are more violent than women, and there are things societies can to to limit the triggering circumstances. Evolutionary theory also explains why humans are short-term thinkers, with significant implications for our economics (credit-card debt), health (obesity), and addiction behaviors.

None of this offers moral lessons, but it explains the underlying driver of many human circumstances, as well as the consequences - we are the ones who have to judge how to act.
 
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wiscoaster

Well-known member
...

However, you ignore evolution at your peril.

Evidence: mRNA COVID-19 vaccines which foster evolution of the virus into more virulent strains so as to preserve itself.

Lesson: don't try to outsmart Mother Nature. She's smarter than we are.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Evidence: mRNA COVID-19 vaccines which foster evolution of the virus into more virulent strains so as to preserve itself.

Lesson: don't try to outsmart Mother Nature. She's smarter than we are.
Sometimes diseases are tricky. We still can't vaccinate against HIV or most strains of the herpes family of viruses (I think shingles is the only one we can vaccinate against).

But polio, smallpox, etc. are essentially gone because we created effective vaccines, saving tens of millions from death, disfigurement, or paralysis. My money is on vaccines being ultimately able to keep up with COVID, albeit haltingly.
 

Howland937

Active member
Evidence of Evolution:
Previously, people who were not vehemently opposed to one side or another were called wishy-washy or fence sitters and people who were solidly on one side or the other were the base.
Now, if you're on the fence you're moderate and if you're not on the fence, you're an extremist. According to everyone on the other side of the fence.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Sitting on a fence gets to be uncomfortable after a long while.
Science is not on the fence about this.

There are young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, creationists who believe in micro-evolution, creationists who don't, etc., etc. And then there are Vedic creationists, Christian creationists, Hindu creationists, among many others, all of whom hold mutually incompatible origin beliefs.

And then there are the scientists, who all believe the same thing: evolution by natural selection.
 
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wiscoaster

Well-known member
Science is not on the fence about this.
Science is and always has been wrong about what they haven't yet discovered and don't yet know. And when finally discovered, the new facts usually end up proving them to have been wrong about whatever they were most dogmatic about. They're almost insanely and ideologically dogmatic about natural selection. Might this be the next they will be proved wrong about? I think it's a good idea to keep an open mind.
 
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theotherwaldo

Well-known member
-It's right up there with people that laugh at the Flat Earthers but are willing to debate the possibility of a Flat Universe... .
 

theotherwaldo

Well-known member
It's the theory that the entire universe is physically two-dimensional. The third dimension is an illusion.
It's right up there with the Hologram Universe and the Matrix Universe,,, ,
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Science is and always has been wrong about what they haven't yet discovered and don't yet know. And when finally discovered, the new facts usually end up proving them to have been wrong about whatever they were most dogmatic about. They're almost insanely and ideologically dogmatic about natural selection. Might this be the next they will be proved wrong about? I think it's a good idea to keep an open mind.
Science uses wrongness in a very specific way that ends up getting us the most accurate description of the material Universe. Being wrong is baked into the process, since it is a synthetic discipline. Being proven wrong (even to a minor degree) is literally how science progresses.

But is is always other scientists doing the proving, not the Discovery Institute. With Darwin, like with Einstein, Galileo, and Newton, you might nibble around the edges, but you won't prove them wrong.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Explain how they are wrong professor Wikipedia
Well, it is hard to know where to start, since it is a solid hour of wrong. Just brief overview:
1. They are wrong about the fossil record - it is full of transitional forms. But gaps are from times when the geology was doing erosion, not deposition.
2. Evolution of new species need not take millions of years - we have observed it in real time on Earth (some happen fast, some slow, depending on the environmental pressures).
3. And, oh man, the math. Here is a reasonable summary of their errors:
and a shorter one:
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Seems like Professor Wikipedia is being deliberately vague.
Really? You are not aware that science is a way of understanding the material world in which every idea or fact is subject to check and refutation by other scientists? It is synthetic and moves forward by refuting or refining previous ideas. Sometimes this means a major revision (Newton rejects Aristotle's idea that heavier objects fall faster), but more often there are revisions (Newton discovered that orbits were elliptical, not circular as proposed by Galileo), or or refinements, as how modern genetics is constantly refining our knowledge of the way the genome produces morphology.
 
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