Evolution: The Scientific Evidence

[Jwb52z]

Mally, I also sympathize with you. I don't know why you keep trying in these discussions after so long of no real preferrable results. There are some days when I read your posts and I want to cry because I feel you digging yourself a hole that you'll never be able to climb out of with the other posters here. I've held my tongue until T. Rex made this last post about his wife. I would advise you not to go on any longer about God and religion on the board until such time as he has healed over this time in his life. It doesn't do either of you any good because he is not consoled, but rather the opposite I think, from yours or anyone else's words. Trust me, I know how you want to help people, but it doesn't really work with the people you are dealing with on this board to any significant degree. Please, give yourself a rest. It's futile, even if you don't feel like it is. I spent nearly a decade being like you are on different boards. I can tell where it's going and I don't want you to have to end up completely frustrated as I did for months years ago. I am not trying to discourage you, just redirect your energy into a more worthwhile and fruitful venture that might accomplish the same goal you intend that will actually work.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

The Lord gives man various qualities distinct from his predecessor fossil, like Free will, the sense to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil and a *conscience* to be aware of his actions and many more qualities too numerous to present the differences from his immediate predecessor fossil.

(a) To which predecessor fossil do you refer?

(b) How did you determine that that predecessor fossil did not have (when alive, of course) free will, ability to distinguish right from wrong and good from evil, or a conscience?

He realises that it is wrong to kill a fellow human being.

Correction: He realizes that it is wrong to kill a fellow human being of his own tribe, but has a lower threshold for killing those who are outside, or are deemed to have placed themselves outside, his tribe. (See Biblical verses about Israelites smiting their enemies, or the tradition of Americans' representing their wartime (be it WW1, WW2, Vietnam or Iraq) enemies as being not-quite-fully-human. Not only Americans have done the latter, of course.)

Why ? He has an inbuilt conscience that tells him it is wrong to do so. So who told him so? Was it a fellow human Being?

Yes. The societies that used the no-killing-within-the-tribe rule fared better than those that didn't.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

What does the Darwinian hypothesis say about death?
Do you believe that evolution leads us back to dust? and no more?

Portraying evolution as somehow failing because it doesn't provide comforting answers to questions that are not in its realm would be a "strawman" rhetorical tactic.

Then lets follow the Epicurean philosophy 'Lets eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die?'

Pretending that evolution is a philosophy, or that it necessarily implies some philosophy, is a "straw man".

Will you say that on your death bed breathing your last?

I might say that I tried to avoid self-deception (both mine and others') when seeking, and pointing out to others, truth about the natural world.

Every civilisation has believed in life after death

... and most believed the Earth was flat.

Let me ask you why then are we afraid of death?

In general, those who don't fear death tend to leave fewer descendants than those who do, so fear of death undoubtedly evolved long ago. Of course, there are special circumstances in which an individual's self-sacrifice can increase the survival chances of his relatives and existing descendants, but those are far outnumbered by the preceding sentence's circumstances.

We die every time we breathe out so why is the final breathing out so difficult and awesome?
This is where the Darwinian theory fails.

"Fails"?

"Darwinism" (evolution, I presume you mean) does provide a simple and straightforward answer -- I just pointed it out.

So, if you were thinking that this is evolutionary theory's only point of failure, do you now admit that it is a success, not a failure?

[mfgoode]

cheesehead. With reference to post # 134. Your #135 just beat me by 5 mins.

Thank you for your reply but I'm afraid it is a bit out of date.
Kindly refer to my post # 128. and then take over from there.

[QUOTE =]Well Bruno, I have to agree with you and Paul that introducing God at the formation of Adam is inelegant. Its very difficult to over look the fact that God is really not necessary. [/QUOTE]

Mally

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Thank you for your reply but I'm afraid it is a bit out of date.

In more ways than one! I've been revising both #134 and #135 several ways in the past half-hour, so try refreshing your browser and re-reading them now that I've stopped changing them. :-)

Kindly refer to my post # 128. and then take over from there.

How about restating why you say my reply was out of date, whether it is still out of date after my revisions, and how your post #128 relates to this?

[ewmayer]

From today's New York Times, and involving the schoole where I was on the faculty from '93-99:

Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution:

Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: October 26, 2006

In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.

The professors’ favored candidate is Tom Sawyer, a former congressman and onetime mayor of Akron. They hope Mr. Sawyer, a Democrat, will oust Deborah Owens Fink, a leading advocate of curriculum standards that encourage students to challenge the theory of evolution.

Elsewhere in Ohio, scientists have also been campaigning for candidates who support the teaching of evolution and have recruited at least one biologist from out of state to help.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve who organized the circulation of the letter, said almost 90 percent of the science faculty on campus this semester had signed it. The signers are anthropologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists and psychologists.

The letter says Dr. Owens Fink has “attempted to cast controversy on biological evolution in favor of an ill-defined notion called Intelligent Design that courts have ruled is religion, not science.”

In an interview, Dr. Krauss said, “This is not some group of fringe scientists or however they are being portrayed by the creationist community,” adding, “This is the entire scientific community, and I don’t know of any other precedent for almost the entire faculty at an institution” making such a statement.

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was “laughable.”

Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. In recent years, with creationist challenges to the teaching of evolution erupting in school districts around the country, groups like the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent scientific organization, have repeatedly made this point.

But the academy’s opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as “a group of so-called scientists.”

“I may have said that, yeah,” she said.

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, “This isn’t about my beliefs.”

School board elections in Ohio are nonpartisan, but Dr. Owens Fink said she was a registered Republican. Her opponent, Mr. Sawyer, was urged to run for the Seventh District Board of Education seat by a new organization, Help Ohio Public Education, founded by Dr. Krauss and his colleague Patricia Princehouse, a biologist and historian of science, and Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University.

At the group’s invitation, Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, will be in Ohio today through the weekend campaigning for other school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution. Dr. Miller, an author of a widely used biology textbook, was a crucial witness in the recent lawsuit in Dover, Pa., over intelligent design. The judge in that case ruled that it was a religious doctrine that had no place in a public school curriculum.

After that decision, Dr. Owens Fink said, the Ohio board abandoned curriculum standards that mandated a critical look at evolution, a decision she said she regretted. “Some people would rather just fold,” she said.

But Dr. Miller said it was a good call, adding, “We have to make sure these good choices get ratified at the ballot box.”

Love this quote by the disingenuous Dr. Fink:

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, “This isn’t about my beliefs.”

That's right - it's not about her personal beliefs: it's about truth, justice, the american way, spreading democracy, the war on terror, &c. These things are all so self-evident, why should she be bothered to actually describe what her beliefs in this regard are? It's only a matter of future state educational policy which will affect millions of schoolchildren...no big deal...

[brunoparga]

Some interesting points:

The science candidate is backed by a number of scientists, the disciplines of which rely quite a bit, very much or overwhelmingly upon evolution. The creationist candidate is a marketing professor.

Now, Ernst, it seems to me, looking from the outside, that the overall mindframe which supports creationism, that is, religious fundamentalists, isn't too different from the one which supports "war on terror" (=war on civil liberties, on Islam...)

Regarding the "war on terror", I've seen this very interesting movie at the SP Film Festival, it's called The Road to Guantánamo, by Michael Winterbottom. It's a documentary about three Englishmen of Pakistani origin who have been kept prisoner without any rights at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Bruno

PS: The idea that the majority of the scientific community supports evolution is indeed laughable, or it's at least tongue-in-cheek: see Project Steve

[S485122]

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron ...
But the academy’s opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as “a group of so-called scientists.”

Next thing she will claim that marketting is a science. And after that it will be economy classified as a science :-)

[mfgoode]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

From today's New York Times, and involving the schoole where I was on the faculty from '93-99:

Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution:



Love this quote by the disingenuous Dr. Fink:

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, “This isn’t about my beliefs.”

That's right - it's not about her personal beliefs: it's about truth, justice, the american way, spreading democracy, the war on terror, &c. These things are all so self-evident, why should she be bothered to actually describe what her beliefs in this regard are? It's only a matter of future state educational policy which will affect millions of schoolchildren...no big deal...

Well Ernst I think evolution and creationism should grow side by side in school curricula. Its like the grass and the weeds (whichever is which). Sooner or later one will choke the other.

It is dangerous to stamp out religion in society altogether as they are finding out in the U. K. which percentage wise has more of a mixed immigrant religious population than the U.S.

Clearly it can be dangerous as the Archbishop found on his visit to China.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/oct/27veil.htm

Mally

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Well Ernst I think evolution and creationism should grow side by side in school curricula. Its like the grass and the weeds (whichever is which). Sooner or later one will choke the other.

Creationism has, basically, the same status in science as the phlogiston theory, and deserves no more time in science classes than phlogiston, i.e., an example of a former theory that is now outmoded. Scientifically, evolution has already "choked" creationism. So now creationism belongs in religion or social classes, not science class (except as an example of a former theory that is now outmoded).

That some people still claim that creationism is valid science is a social issue, not a scientific one, though it does illustrate that many people do not understand what science (or evolution) is, which may have educational implications that science class curricula should include more explanation of the distinctions between science and nonscience.

It is dangerous to stamp out religion in society altogether

Are you seriously implying that refusal to teach creationism in science classes amounts to stamping out religion?

If so, then (A) you are admitting that creationism is religion, not science, and (B) you are absurdly exaggerating the effect as "stamping out" religion (since banning it from science class doesn't exclude it from other classes, not to mention all the noncreationist aspects of religion).

If not (implying that ... amounts to stamping out religion), then why did you include that unrelated statement right after mentioning creationism?

- - -

BTW, can you produce a scientifically testable scientific prediction made by creationism that differs from what evolution predicts? If you (or anyone else) can't, then creationism is not science. Note that nonscientific predictions do not count, nor do predictions that cannot be tested. Also note that predictions do not have to be about future events; they can be about evidence of past events.

[ewmayer]

From today's New York Times Science section:

Books on Science -- An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

Full text, in case the above link goes dead:

Books on Science

An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: October 31, 2006

Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.

Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.

Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as “trolley problems.”

Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?

Most people say it is.

Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?

Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem.

Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.

Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?

Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.

His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.

Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.

But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.

“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.

His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.

Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.