The word evolution

[Professor Chaos]

[Waddlie]

Rocketman the Sequel wrote

I think you need to be a little more discerning about the use of the word retarded. I mean there is the common use...for the mentally challenged...then there is the idea of impeding motion--and then of course there is flame retardant--which is only marginally connected.

So I propose we use the word retarded only for the mentally challenged, and substitute the word --stopfromgoeeness--for the second--and the word flamitynono for the third--that way everyone will understand.

[Sternwallow]

Rocketman the Sequel wrote

I think you need to be a little more discerning about the use of the word retarded. I mean there is the common use...for the mentally challenged...then there is the idea of impeding motion--and then of course there is flame retardant--which is only marginally connected.

So I propose we use the word retarded only for the mentally challenged, and substitute the word --stopfromgoeeness--for the second--and the word flamitynono for the third--that way everyone will understand.

This post was in no way retarded.

[anthonyjfuchs]

Since this thread seems dead in the water, I doubt that anyone will be too heartbroken if it is repurposed.

Flipping through my new copy of the Nation, I found an article by atheist writer Ian Hacking entitled Root and Branch concerning what he calls the evolutionary "research program" in the light of "the anti-Darwin movement."

Two of my favorite quotes from the article:

Ian Hacking wrote

I have said nothing about the second sticking point for the anti-Darwin movement, that chance variation and natural selection have sufficed to produce the living world as we know it. It is an incredible doctrine. Darwin himself was pretty cautious about it. I respect anyone who says he cannot believe it. But that is where one should stay, in a state of disbelief. Once you start arguing against it, you end up being silly. Intelligent design is silly.

Ian Hacking wrote

Degenerate programs paint themselves into smaller and smaller corners, skirting problems they'd prefer not to face. They seldom or never have a new, positive explanation of anything. In short, they teach us nothing. ...anti-Darwin posturing...explains nothing. Anti-Darwinism is not pseudo-science or even dead science so much as degenerate science.

I should note, however, that the linked article contains a paragraph which reads:

Ian Hacking wrote

The human genome does have an incredible amount of historical information that we have only just begun to decode. Genetic anthropology is the liveliest of the human sciences today. It uses molecular biology to track the movements of peoples across the globe. It is a fabulous continuation of the program begun in another of Darwin's great books, The Descent of Man (1871). At the end of May this year, an enormous Creation Museum and Family Discovery Center opened near Cincinnati; innocent children are told that "The first man walked with dinosaurs and named them all!"

While the original paragraph in the magazine reads:

Ian Hacking wrote

The human genome does have an incredible amount of historical information that we have only just begun to decode. Genetic anthropology is the liveliest of the human sciences today. It uses molecular biology to track the movements of peoples across the globe. It is a fabulous continuation of the program begun in another of Darwin's great books, The Descent of Man (1871). At the end of his book In the Beginning, Michael Lienesch mentions the recently established Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where children are shown dioramas of Adam and Eve fleeing from dinosaurs. What a striking contrast between progress (genetic anthropology) and degeneration (fantasy dioramas of the impossible).

I much prefer the line "What a striking contrast between progress (genetic anthropology) and degeneration (fantasy dioramas of the impossible)."

One of the biggest problems with humanity is the concept of heirarchy--because then in breeds the idea of authority absent any credentials--portable authority so to speak.

The pulpit, the nobility, the government, all partake in the transfer of unearned authority.


So what the fuck does this have to do with anything?

The problem is that the people who are not working to understand the reasoning behind the example will beleive that the dinosaur eden exists cause a museum told them so.

And this is the only sticking point I have--part of me wants to say "go ahead"--make your museum--it will turn out to be wrong in the end---and people will know it.

But while it will be wrong regardless--it will be believed cause the mechanics of the big lie still work.

a church can be wrong time and time again--becasue it has a mechanism to maintain it's authority in the face of it.

A university or a science program must continually justify their theories or lose accreditation etc...one would hope.

In any case--fuck heirarchies

[PanAtheist]

myst7426 wrote

I have been noticing that the word evolution is being used frequently in my astronomy textbook. My professor uses the term a lot as well. In all instances, the word does not describe organic evolution. This is a main problem with all the idiot theists like Kent Hovind using the word incorrectly. Scientists need to be more careful with terminology.

Let's look at the etymology of the word!

Evolve
1641, "to unfold, open out, expand," from L. evolvere "unroll," from ex- "out" + volvere "to roll" (see vulva). Evolution (1622), originally meant "unrolling of a book;" it first was used in the modern scientific sense 1832 by Scot. geologist Charles Lyell. Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.


If Charles Lyell introduced "evolution" to describe the process of rock formations, then Myst's assumption is disproven.

Myself, I don't care for the word "evolution", so I am entertained to find that neither did Darwin, and for essentially the same reason: that it describes an unfurling of something ready-made. In other words, it is as a creationist word.

When I am forced to use it, I think of it as it echoing the sense of the phrasal verb "to turn out" (although I don't know the etymology of *that*).

Frankly, I would prefer if it "evolution" were abandoned.

Nevertheless it has obtained a meaning, the accrual of change, that is free from its etymology, and that is quite normal.

snap crafter wrote

Kent Hovind is far from an idiot, he knows how to sell his wares.

Everything evolves! Ideas evolve, species evolve, the universe evolves; who cares what idiots think.

Well I for one am worried about scientific illiteracy. Most of those who are ignorant about the basics of science are not idiots, they have possibly been let down by the education system. But the blame can't be put only on the school system, after all anyone can educate themselves, through books, magazines, websites, documentaries and so on.

But either way it is worrying. A civilisation dependent on advanced technology needs a population that understands at least the basics about how stuff works. And one thing that seems to be almost forgotten in elementary and high school education is the scientific method. How science is done and why it's the superior method of understanding nature is in my opinion extremely important to understand. Sometimes it seems to me that people think that "science" is just one of many possible worldviews, one among many in a group where religions are included as well. That can never be good.

[calpurnpiso]

I wonder how many of those Christ-psychotic retards know that the word evolution and the idea of natural selection originated with the Grandfather
of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin.? Christians are too stupid and deluded to do research on the subject.