Interesting Stuff Thread

darjeeling

2Scoops wrote: »

He's writes essentially the same article on evolution once a year or more, whips up the atheist rationalist rabble into a frenzy, and generates some column inches on the letters page. It's his way of appearing controversial and relevant.

Sounds about right. In fact, an awful lot of columnists seem to have missed their calling as internet trolls.

2Scoops

LOL. The aforementioned Ian O'Doherty being one of them (sorry Galvasean!). :pac:

DTrotter

So he's saying believing in evolution is up there with the funny cut tree?

Galvasean

2Scoops wrote: »

LOL. The aforementioned Ian O'Doherty being one of them (sorry Galvasean!). :pac:

Speaking of whom, there was a letter complaining about him for his joke about the Polish killing all their Jews, claiming to be 'deeply offended' and pointing out the historical and ststistical errors of his punchline.

Zombrex

He says he is not a Creationist but obviously the creationust FUD is working on him

"Now life as we know it depends on proteins. But even a relatively simple molecule such as insulin, consists of 51 conjoined amino-acids, with a molecular weight of 5808: nearly 6,000 times the weight of a hydrogen atom. And an average living cell contains 100 million protein molecules, involving perhaps 20,000 varieties of protein. Moreover, there are several hundred thousand types of protein, all of them impossibly complex. How were these made by accident? To say that such order is implicit in all of nature -- as some scientists do -- is begging the question, the equivalent of saying matter is intrinsic to materials."

This is the same tired Creationist argument that modern proteins could not have randomly formed. Guess what, no one claimed they did. The current thinking, supported by evidence and experiment, is that they evolved from more primitive molecules.

Sam Vimes

Wicknight wrote: »

This is the same tired Creationist argument that modern proteins could not have randomly formed. Guess what, no one claimed they did. The current thinking, supported by evidence and experiment, is that they evolved from more primitive molecules.

It took me a while to even grasp that this was what creationists were saying because it shows complete ignorance of what evolution is. I thought they had at least some idea of what they were rejecting.

They're picking a point that happened millions of years along the evolutionary path, the formation of proteins, declaring that to be the first stage and saying it's impossible for it to be the first stage. Well no sh!t, no one said it was. If they're going to declare proteins as being the first stage they might as well declare the first stage as being fully formed humans. Oh wait that is what they say

bnt

Even the title of Darwin's book hasn't been answered adequately. How do separate species emerge, in the process of "speciation"? How do outwardly identical, but reproductively-discrete species emerge alongside one another in the same ecological niche, as many kinds of fish have done?

Talk about getting it bass-ackwards. We (humans) defined the concept of "species", as the ability to interbreed, and use it because it's useful. It is not some universally-defined hard-and-fast line drawn by nature.

Human-triggered speciation has never occurred, despite separations of thousands of years.

Really? For example, you could argue that dogs have already been separated in to unique species by selective breeding (a.k.a. unnatural selection). A Chihuahua has great difficulty mating with a St. Bernard. Yes, we can produce a hybrid by IVF (human intervention, i.e. more unnatural selection!), but left to their own devices, they would be very unlikely to mate successfully. So, do a Chihuahua and a St. Bernard both still belong to the species Canis lupus familiaris? What about after a hundred or a thousand years of not interbreeding? When do we draw the line, and does it matter?

My point is: the technical ability to interbreed - which is how we define a species - may still exist in theory when other factors make it impossible. This is one thing Darwin was getting at when he used the Galapagos islands as an example: species getting split in to discrete groups, with miles of ocean between them, so that they are no longer able to meet and mate. After many generations of evolutionary pressures, the species evolve in different directions, the ability to interbreed is lost through disuse (genetic drift), and we (humans) are now talking about many species rather than one.

It's not a question of years, it's a question of generations. Humans are a very long-lived species, compared to most mammals, never mind birds or insects, so human evolution is obviously going to be slow. Bacteria and insects live even shorter lives and, sure enough, you can force them to speciate under lab conditions. Fruit flies do start to speciate if you feed them different foods over many generations - so there's your human-triggered speciation, right there, in an experiment to simulate geographic separation.

Galvasean

There was a letter in today's Indo where someone pointed out some of the many flaws in the Myers article. The author was from Mayo (IIRC). Anyone here?

edit: someone else wrote in about Ian O' Doherty's racism.

Tyler MacDurden

Galvasean wrote: »

There was a letter in today's Indo where someone pointed out some of the many flaws in the Myers article. The author was from Mayo Monaghan (IIRC). Anyone here?

Worth a read, here ya go. Wondered if it was a boardsie too.

Thursday July 16 2009

HOWEVER thought-provoking Kevin Myers' column has been in the past, his blundering appraisal of evolution and natural selection (Irish Independent, July 14) only served to make him sound foolish and uninformed.

He compares people's faith in a Limerick tree stump to Darwinists' "faith" in natural selection. He calls 150 years of scientific theory "preposterous" because he believes evolution relies on pure accident.

How did "the complete navigation gene arrive out of nowhere?" he asks.

The alternative, cumulative change, he dismisses because even a simple molecule such as insulin is "impossibly complex". He uses the words "accident" and "complex" quite a lot in his article.

Essentially, therefore, Mr Myers is scornful of natural selection as the vehicle of evolution because it's difficult to grasp and he doesn't understand it.

He says he has been "reading up on the subject" recently.

He even mentions Richard Dawkins. I can only wonder which of Dawkins' books it was he read.

I'd recommend 'The Blind Watchmaker' (Penguin Books, first published in 1986), which, if he read it carefully, would address all of the concerns he raises in his article.

But don't just take my word for it. It was Douglas Adams' favourite book. "It's like throwing open the doors and windows in a dark and stuffy room" he said, when asked why.

"You realise what a jumble of half-digested ideas we normally live with, particularly those of us with an arts education. We 'sort of' understand evolution . . . . Dawkins shows us that there is a dazzling clarity that is breathtaking when we suddenly see it."

Mr Myers says he doesn't embrace either intelligent design or creationism, but nor does he reject them.

This is uncharacteristically limp-wristed agnosticism from someone usually so forthright in his opinion.

And yet Mr Myers sees fit to propagate popular misunderstanding of a theory that has withstood intensive scientific investigation for a century and a half on the strength of a bit of "reading up" he's done recently.

Dades

Good letter. Bravo, Mr Mayne.

Dave!

Very good indeed

marco_polo

Perhaps we should all chip in to preorder him a copy of this :pac:

http://www.richarddawkins.net/thegreatestshowonearth

Galvasean

marco_polo wrote: »

Perhaps we should all chip in to preorder him a copy of this :pac:

http://www.richarddawkins.net/thegreatestshowonearth

Ooooh, when's that out?

marco_polo

Galvasean wrote: »

Ooooh, when's that out?

I think it is the 10th of September. Looking forward to getting a copy.

Dades

Look forward to that one, too. Should spark a bit of debate 'round these parts.

On a kind of aside - I did a Google Ireland search for the book title and this site came up first...

http://www.in6days.ie/

Sweet Jebus, some Irish fella seems to be pedaling this crap.

MrPudding

Is the Dawkins shop US based?

MrP

marco_polo

Dades wrote: »

Look forward to that one, too. Should spark a bit of debate 'round these parts.

On a kind of aside - I did a Google Ireland search for the book title and this site came up first...

http://www.in6days.ie/

Sweet Jebus, some Irish fella seems to be pedaling this crap.

A teacher too? Not science I hope :eek:

2Scoops

Dades wrote: »

http://www.in6days.ie/
Sweet Jebus, some Irish fella seems to be pedaling this crap.

Evidently, Dr. Donnelly's thesis wasn't put through turnitin.com. What would creationists do without copy&paste? Another well-earned doctorate from Freedom Bible College, the home of evangelical distance learning on the net.

Tar.Aldarion

Interesting video on diseases and evolution etc: http://richarddawkins.net/article,3931,Sapolsky-on-Religion,Robert-Sapolsky
Anyway like his videos, so having a look at em.

Interesteing but off topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s

robindch

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky's a smart guy and has little time for religion. I think it's in the beginning of his very funny A Primate's Memoir that he mentions that when he started out his research on baboons, he retaliated against his creationist biology teachers by naming all the members of his baboon troupe after biblical characters, so that at some point in the future, he'd be able to note down that he'd seen Nebuchadnezzar bugger Ruth.

lostexpectation

there loads of evangelical nutters out there somebody needs to start anti -evangical watch ireland site

Tar.Aldarion

robindch wrote: »

Sapolsky's a smart guy and has little time for religion. I think it's in the beginning of his very funny A Primate's Memoir that he mentions that when he started out his research on baboons, he retaliated against his creationist biology teachers by naming all the members of his baboon troupe after biblical characters, so that at some point in the future, he'd be able to note down that he'd seen Nebuchadnezzar bugger Ruth.

Hehe. Just enjoying his vids atm, would be a good lecturer. Pity i didn't cough up for standford. :pac:
Might pick up the book some time.

fitz0

Just wondering as regards creationism: God is immaterial yes? But he made all matter in the universe. So, something came from nothing?

Isn't that the whole lynchpin of the creation argument, that something can't come from nothing? Maybe I'm just not theologically educated but it seems like the same thing to me.

Tar.Aldarion

fitz0 wrote: »

Just wondering as regards creationism: God is immaterial yes? But he made all matter in the universe. So, something came from nothing?

Isn't that the whole lynchpin of the creation argument, that something can't come from nothing? Maybe I'm just not theologically educated but it seems like the same thing to me.

There is nothing logical about the argument in the first place, you can't try and pick a hole in the logic of something that has been founded on illogical premises.

Zombrex

fitz0 wrote: »

Just wondering as regards creationism: God is immaterial yes? But he made all matter in the universe. So, something came from nothing?

Isn't that the whole lynchpin of the creation argument, that something can't come from nothing? Maybe I'm just not theologically educated but it seems like the same thing to me.

Yeah that is something I've put to Creationists (and believers in general) and the answer is always that God can do what ever he wants.

I do think it is amusing that some people claim to have great logical objections to certain ideas (something coming from nothing) but then seem perfectly happy with the idea when it is presented in a nice fluffy comforting way with an loving deity.

Zillah

The more devious believers tend to add the caveat that only that which has a beginning requires a cause.

Which is still tripe logically but requires a slightly more complicated response.

AJG

ABP?

Yikes anyway.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/08/the_creation_museum_1.php

Dades

AJG, rather than entertaining those muppets in a new thread I think it better we place this in here.

Apologies in advance, Evolution, for even associating you with this.

pts

Interesting article though, the people behind that "museum" reminds me of someone from "the other side"

lostexpectation

is the museum big enough for 240 people to visit it at once?

didn't think it was such a good idea to turn up in such a large group seemed to turn out ok though