"Acceptance of evolution is a sign of low self-esteem"

A creationist whackjob recently made the following, sweeping, ridiculous statement:

Most of you who believe the evolved story IMHO seem to have such a low opinion of mankind, it translates to low self esteem.

I responded as follows:

If evolution is correct, the number of individual beings which could be standing here in your place vastly outnumber all of the grains of sand, on all of the beaches, in all of the world. You're the inheritor of a genetic legacy which stretches back 3.8 billion years through the eons, and which has circled the center of our galaxy about 20 times. You're the endpoint of billions of generations of births, competitions, wars, and deaths; the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that can possibly result in you. Your forbears have survived arguably the single greatest ecological catastrophe ever to hit the planet; when the earliest plants started poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen. Yet, your ancestors learned to use this poisonous gas to produce energy in a way that had never been attempted before; an evolutionary triumph which paved the way for the first multicellular life. Your genetic line has survived floods, freezes, and meteor impacts from the skies themselves, preserving this single genetic line through the eons to lead ultimately to you. This is a legacy you share with every living thing on earth, from the largest creature ever to have lived; the blue whale; to the lowliest prion. You share this legacy with the blades of grass between your toes and the trees that give you shade. You are a thread in a huge, amazing, incredibly diverse tapestry of living things; some of whom have clawed their way out of the seas to survive on land, some of whom remained in the ocean, and a few of whom stood on land for a few million years, ultimately said "well, screw this" and marched back into the sea. Once we add cosmology into the mix, not only does this legacy stretch to everything living, but to the non-living as well. You share your origins with the stars and planets. The asteroids which hang in space, all the way down to the loneliest hydrogen atom in deep space. All the parts that make you stretch back through the eons and have borne witness to the very birth of the universe. They have seen the birth and death of stars, supernovae, black holes and pulsars. They've seen planets torn to pieces and solar systems form. They've seen galaxies coalesce and skies darken.

The universe is much more grand, more amazing, more beautiful, more elegant and more subtle than has ever been written in any holy book, and you are here, against nigh-incalculable odds, to see it all. Just consider that for a moment.

If that's a sign of low self esteem, what the hell are your standards for a high one?

The Evil Evolutionist conspiracy has issued a directive.

Some of you may have heard about Ben Stein's latest movie. Well, the google-bombing gauntlet has been thrown down. Expelled Exposed is a project by the National Center for Science Education exposing the fraud that is Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" and never was there a more appropriate title. You literally have to leave your brain at the door in order to believe the bullshit spewed throughout the movie.

Fortunately, I don't have to spend my time chronicling the misrepresentations, ludicrous claims and outright falsehoods of the movie. You can find them here: Expelled

Biologists Helping Bookstores

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm all for accuracy in filing books in bookstores; and as a biologist it sorta goes without saying that I believe Intelligent Design and Creation Science to be crap, but it seems like this lady isn't making a statement so much as she's making a mess. All she's really accomplishing is giving the employees more work. Bookstores don't file for accuracy, they file books where they'll sell the best. If putting Darwin's Origin of Species along side Harlequin Romance novels would make it sell better, they'd do it.

That said, if you file something in the "Science" section, you expect that it contains factual information. Nobody thinks that you should put a book in the "Modern Medicine" section that advocates smoking ten packs a day and eating junk food. Filing these books in the science section offers pseudoscience books a credibility that they have not earned through the process of peer-review.

Like I said, I'm really not sure how I feel about this, so I offer the link here, and in my blog roll, so you can decide for yourself.

Evolution is responsible for all the world's evils

I've heard some people claim, in response to the Dover Pennsylvania "Panda Trial" that the theory of evolution is somehow the root of all evil on earth. They seem convinced that it was somehow responsible for the Holocaust, racism, sexism, homosexuality, and just about any other evil that they can put through their minds.

So, just for the sake of argument, let's assume that they're right. Let's assume that the theory of evolution is responsible for death, sin, murder, genocide, global warming, Communism, Fascism, Socialism, solipsism, masturbation, mental instability, measles, mumps, rubella, the decline of religion, premature ageing, baldness, short sight, hindsight, drunk driving, myopia, hypermetropia, overpriced CD singles, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1989, the Anchorage Earthquake of 1967, Pompeii, Mt. St. Helens, Pierce Brosnan no longer starring as James Bond, Daniel Craig starring as James Bond, AIDS, terrible daytime TV, movie pirating, music pirating, Mills and Boon, the hole in the ozone layer, the 8th season of Friends, the seventh season of Highlander, the second season of Sequest DSV, fraudulent Stock Exchange transactions, Florence Foster Jenkins, the assassinations of John Lennon, Abraham Lincoln and JFK, gay marriage, gays, lesbians, Brokeback Mountain not getting "Best Picture," Brokeback Mountain getting nominated for best picture, feminism, lesbianism, lesbian feminism, cancer, migraines, ulcers, antibiotic resistance in bacteria (well, okay, the theory of Evolution actually is kinda responsible for that one), George W. Bush, Dick Chaney's shooting of Harry Whittington, 9/11, The invasion of Iraq, the Big Bang, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Alzheimers, the hangover I had the other day, American beer, softwood lumber, sex and violence in movies, the collapse of Enron, the London tube strike, professional wrestling, rap music, missing socks, traffic congestion, the Tunguska blast, the ACLU, the Thomas More Law Center, Britney Spears, Hillary Duff, Teletubbies, televangelists, urban blight, poor grammar, lonely spinsters, the Battle of Stalingrad, neurosis, necrosis, halitosis, math class, blood doping in the Olympics, steroid use, every single meth lab in existence, fallen arches, fallen women, falling rocks, boy bands, boy toys, Fox News, bad news, the recent re-make of The Bad News Bears, junk mail, spam, internet porn, pedophilia, soggy cereal, warning labels, arsenic, Pat Robertson (who I suppose falls under "televangelists," but he bears repeating), Osama Bin Laden, the decline in quality of education in the United States, cell phones, people who talk during movies, people who bug me when I'm talking in movies, PETA, overpriced concert tickets and every instance of bad hair that has ever been known.

I think that probably covers all the bases.

Now, why does that mean that Evolution can't account for the diversity of life on earth?

On Evolution, and God.

So I was chatting with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about evolution. It should be mentioned, critically, that my friend, while strongly Christian, does not ascribe to the dogma of the Intelligent Design proponents. He accepts evolution as having occurred; however, in his words, "that doesn't necessarily mean that God wasn't in there somewhere." He sees the book of Genesis as, and this is too good a quote for me not to use directly: "God simplifying natural history down to a level that a bunch of illiterate goatherds standing on a hill could understand and remember," which is basically what I've been saying since I found out about the whole Evolution/Intelligent Design debate; albeit somewhat more eloquently.

The thing, he said, that bothered him was the fact that Evolution required you to start with the assumption that God doesn't exist.

That was the epiphany moment for me. Ever since I learned about this so-called Intelligent Design theory, it confused the hell out of me why some people, many of whom are actually relatively intelligent, would deny the findings of just about every single branch of the natural sciences just to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old; and that all animals in existence were magically created in their current form. At that moment, I finally understood: here's a perception that Evolution somehow denies the existence of God; and God's a really tough chick to argue with.

Okay, first off, I don't want this to be an essay on the existence/non-existence of God. That's a question best left to philosophers, theologeans, and people who are a lot smarter than me.

What I do want to get into is whether or not evolution theory actually denies the existence of God.

The short answer is "no."

Evolution theory, in all the forms it has taken since Darwin, and its application as far as abiogenesis and the origins of life on earth says nothing whatsoever about whether or not God exists. It says notning about the existence or functioning of any god or gods. It's basically orthogonal to the question; roughtly as orthogonal to the question as how your microwave oven works.

Is it possible that radioactive decay rates spontaneously change as soon as we're not looking at them? Maybe; but until we have some observable data to support that premise, the scientific approach demands that we avoid speculation and work from solid data. Is it possible that God made the world to "look" old to every experiment we could possibly perform? Again, yes, it's possible, but following that logic through to its natural conclusion, it could be argued that we have no solid proof that all five of our senses are not illusory, so therefore, we know absolutely nothing about the world around us.

The point is that if no observations exist, and no observations can be expected to be made, speculation is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. Sure, speculation can be fun, and it can also draw you in new and interesting directions that you may not have previously considered; but as far as actually understanding a phenomenon, it often reflects far more upon the experimentor's personal baises than it does upon the actual nature of things.

The point is that science works upon what can be observed. Practically by definition, God is an unobservable entity; whether She exists or not. So science simply ignores the question. It's irrelevant to whether or not the theory of evolution is correct or not. We can speculate all we want as to whether God exists, and whether or not She was involved in the creation of life on earth, but all this would be beside the point. Evolution is possibly the single most-supported theory in the biological sciences. While I object to the term "unifying theory" on principle (largely because a lot of people think that it sounds too much like "God"), if the biological sciences have a unifying theory, then evolution would be it. From the gross anatomy of complex animals, to the smallest molecular pathway in our individual cells, there's a certain elegance about the system; and the only scientific explanation which simultaneously explains the magnificent diversity as well as the shocking similarities between the various organisms is Evolution.

Whether or not God was involved is a separate issue.

Kansas Evolution/Creation debate heats up.

Oh, Crap.

Well, the good thing about all this is that Canada will be about a million miles ahead of the US in the biological sciences in about ten years. Which means that the US will be desperately seeking people who actually have some scientific literacy.

Which means that I, an American citizen who is not required to acquire a visa to work in the states, will be a rather valuable commodity in a few years.

But I'd like to bring up this debate for a moment. I'm not particularly inclined towards any religion (although, I confess, I've been leaning a little in the direction of Taoism lately). I'm not baptized; with the exception of very special occasions (Christmas, Baptisms, funerals), I have never attended church; and depending on who you ask, that means that I'm going straight to hell.

I went to a Catholic school for six years. Not being Catholic, my parents went to a degree which some would call obsessive to protect me from any kind of brainwashing. They encouraged me to learn as much about as many different religions as I could, and they taught me to look at the world with an opened mind. As early as the age of seven, I had a rather minimal understanding of Islam, as well as a very shaky knowledge of Buddhism. My knowledge in either of those hasn't increased significantly since then, but I at least had some understanding of what they taught. It wasn't until recently that I understood why my parents felt, at the time, that it was so important for me to learn these things, to have the widest possible perspective by the time I entered first grade. I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that my parents have possibly the greatest understanding of history, and its lessons, of any people I have ever met. They realized that some of the greatest atrocities in history have been perpetrated over the answer given to one of two questions: 1) do you believe in God, and 2) do you belive in my God?

One of the side-effects of my upbringing is that I claim, with absolutely no vanity whatsoever, that I have a greater familiarity with the Bible than many people who profess to be Christian. And it seems to me that the people who assume that the Bible has a blanked answer for absolutely everything don't appear to have ever read it.

There are passages in the Bible which specifically endorse Slavery; stoning someone to death for working seven days a week; and burning someone for wearing mixed threads. Passages in the bible specifically prohibit the eating of shrimp and lobster, while specifically endorsing the consumption of Locusts (something I don't get, considering that shrimp, lobster and locust all share the same phylum).

The bottom line is that if you read the Bible with the intention of interpreting it in an absolute, literal manner; most of what it says is patently absurd.

Now, although some people are very careful not to say that Intelligent Design or Creation is the way to go because it's what the Bible says; it's pretty clear from their rhetoric that that's the direction they're going.

This is entirely based upon a strictily literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. So not only are they forcing a religious agenda on a group of people who may or may not share their beliefs, but they're focing a religious agenda based upon an absurd interpretation of the text.

Let's start with the facts, shall we? Creationism and Intelligent Design have no scientific basis, period. They make no testable predictions, the present no results, and since they have no results, they have no reproducibility. These are considered to be the defining characteristics of a scientifc theory.

Which brings me to my next point: a great deal of noise is being made about the fact that Evolution is a theory, not a fact.

Well, in this sense, I suppose they are correct. Evolution is not a fact, but like any good scientific theory, it is a collection of many facts. It is not the explanation of a single detail, but the sum of all data; all facts; collected. By definition, a scientific theory must explain all available facts. If data is collected which directly contradicts one's theory, that theory must be changed.

In short, Evolution is not a fact, it possesses far more power than any one fact. It is the culmination of almost 150 years of observable, reproducible data. It is the sum total of all knowledge available to scientists at this moment.

Does Evolution have all the answers? Hell, no. But nobody's claiming that it does. That's why science is a continuous process. Every question answered raises more questions.

The Intelligent Design proponents assume that by casting a shadow of doubt upon Evolution; namely that it doesn't explain everything; then Intelligent Design is the only viable option. This is at the very least a shaky interpretation of the scientific method, and depending on how you look at it, may be manifestly dishonest. No scientist ever claims to have all the answers. No scientific theory claims to explain all observed phenomena. Intelligent Design offers the blanket explanation of "God dun it" to slap a band-aid over any unexplained phenomena. It has not testable hypothesis, it makes no predictions about future data.

Ergo, it is unscientific, and has no place whatsoever in the science classroom.

Now, in the interest of balance, I should also mention that I find pure Athiesm to be an unscientific approach as well. Admittedly, evidence of the existence of a higher power; God, Allah, Jaweh, Vishnu, Shiva, to name a few; is somewhat lacking. However, that a higher being somehow pushed things along is also a hypothesis, and the fact that that hypothesis lacks any experimental data to back it up at the moment does not necessarily disprove it. I point out that many of Einstein's theories lacked any experimental support until many years after his death (the speed of gravity, for instance, was only recently measured); and so far, he's been largely correct in many of his predictions.

The point that I'm trying to make is that science can neither assume nor eliminate the possibility that a higher intelligence was at work during the creation of life on earth. However, science deals with observed facts and evidence. So-called Creation Science has provided neither.