Human Origins & Religion

These are posts of mine from the New York Times forum "Human Origins & Religion"

Human Origins

How compatible are religious beliefs and scientific theories?

Go to The Evolution Debate

ehkzu - 2:24 AM ET August 23, 2005 (#32992 of 79743)

The Creationist Cascade
First Post.

For the last few days at least this forum has almost entirely consisted of a protracted debate with advocates of so-called Intelligent Design.

But why? This plainly has nothing to do with the stated mandate of the forum. Such a debate actually belongs in a religion forum. It should be conducted between mainstream religionists who accept evolution as part of God’s universe vs. the fundamentalists who account for the bulk of those touting so-called Intelligent Design (SCID).

That could be an interesting debate, since fundamentalists have turned their backs on Christ’s spiritual revolution (all that kindhearted New Testament love one another stuff that puts the Spirit over the Letter) in favor of a narrowminded, legalistic, all-Letter-no-Spirit devolution of Christianity into a kind of Christian Wahhabism.

Karen Armstrong’s “The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism” ably chronicles what we’re up against. She points out that fundamentalism is a recent development based on fear & anger at the morally complex world we find ourselves in. It’s the Inspector Javert problem, for those of you who’ve read/seen Les Miserables. After you finish this book you’ll know the enemy much better, & perhaps even have a little sympathy for their plight (i.e. not getting to live in Chaucer’s Engelond or thereabouts).

Still, why SCID in this day & age? The answer came to me as I was reading Chemist99A’s discussion of blood clotting (entry #33325). We’re having to deal with SCID because it’s part of a clotting cascade.

Here are the steps:
1. The political donor class (the richest 1% of America) wants to cement the wealth redistribution from the poor & middle classes to itself that it has engineered over the last 30 years.
2. There aren’t enough of them to swing an election, so they need patsies to betray their own needs & principles & give the donor class the 51% it needs to grab power, then gerrymander electoral districts & rig the campaign spending rules so it can perpetuate its control of the economy.
3. Fundamentalists make great patsies—fear & anger are some of the best get-out-the-vote motivators.
4. Shows of public piety & appeals to rigid, simplistic values + inciting fear/anger win over fundamentalists.
5. Fear & anger must be directed at someone. The age of the Robber Barons in the late 19th century was threatened by the Populist movement. The Robber Barons fractured that movement with racist demagoguery—mainly against Blacks, but also against Asians in the west & Jews in the northeast, plus southern European & Slavic immigrants. Today’s Robber Barons have correctly targeted Liberals, since Liberals directly oppose their wealth redistribution schemes—much more than any foreign threat does. That’s why Liberals are even better to vilify than Commies were in the 50s.
6. Education produces Liberals (it also produces Libertarians, but they can be suborned easily with antigovernment appeals).
7. Science education produces rational liberals who are least distracted by Robber Baron fearmongering & weapons of mass distraction.
8. Therefore destroying science education kills two birds with one stone: First, it gives today’s fundamentalists a target they can attack in local school board elections & by directly pressuring teachers & principals (actually, evolution is no longer taught in a majority of Red State areas—not by legal dictum, but just by persuading teachers that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, so they just skip over that chapter). Second, it produces less educated, hence more easily manipulable people.
9. The slick, well-financed campaign of the Creation Institute, with its Hollywood-production-value videos, is perfect for turning America’s science classes into a form of debased religion. And that’s the clotting cascade that winds up with us debating so-called Intelligent Design in a science forum in the New York Times in 2005.

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ehkzu - 10:59 PM ET August 23, 2005 (#33325 of 79737)

Intelligent Design has won

...because ID's real goal is to stop evolution from being taught.

First & foremost, it has won in the classroom. I believe if you surveyed all our public school science teachers, a majority would admit they no longer teach evolution—not because the state or the school board told ‘em not to, but because when they tried to teach it kids showed up brandishing bibles like taser guns, challenging everything the teachers said.

They stopped because the fundie parents harassed them & their principals, & the principals quietly advised them just to go with the flow & not buck “the community.” And it was easy to stop teaching it because their bio textbooks had ghettoized evolution into special chapters that could be skipped over or made optional, instead of weaving evolution into every page, every lesson.

So-called ID is just a feint to distract America’s intelligentsia while the real dirty work goes on out of the spotlight. This is the political genius of the RNC (Rich Nabobs’ Cabal) & the deal with the devil that the religious right has made with their paymasters: You apply leverage out of sight as much as possible.

If so-called ID were to be debated in Congress at a national policymaking level the scientific community would shred it into confetti. That goes for policymaking at the state level (except for the most backward states) as well. Heck, even at the school district level it could gain unwelcome national attention. But at the level of an individual science teacher just skipping the chapter? No problemo.

And no one notices. Heck, it’s even won in this forum. We could be discussing valid issues about human evolution. Instead this forum (in the last few days at least) spends >90% of its time batting down the intellectual gibberish IDiots crank out.

And sure we win every debate. So what? Kerry won all three debates with Bush, & look where it got him. In my first post (#33337) I described the so-called ID phenomenon as a clotting sequence triggered by the need of the political donor class to cement its successful scheme to appropriate more & more of the wealth produced by the other 98% of the economy (generally, people making less than about $250/yr.). Read it for the gory details.

However, I thought of an even simpler explanation: Chinese Com-yew-nists. Since we’re their biggest customer, they don’t want to destroy us. But they do want to supplant our current technological superiority with theirs, so that we’re reduced to sending them raw materials & getting MP3 players & summer frocks in return. What better way than to degrade our educational system so it only churns out consumers of technology rather than creators of it?

So here’s my conspiracy theory: the Com-yew-nists are secretly funding the Discovery Institute through far-right front men who’re playing ball with them to have power over us here, even if it does end up with us becoming a satrapy of China in 50 years. The Chinese take the long view & capitalize on our inability to do so.

Makes sense, huh? Meanwhile, why do the smart folks in this forum waste their time demolishing one lame ID argument after another? No ID’er has EVER changed his or her mind as a consequence.

They’re like the lady who thought she was dead. Her family dragged her to a shrink, who asked her: What’s the problem? No problem, I’m just dead, she said. He pondered this, then asked her Do dead people bleed? Of course not, she said. So he pricked her finger with a surgical needle & squeezed out a bright red drop of blood. She stared at it in amazement, then declared Holy cow! Dead people do bleed...

So…instead, find out what’s actually being taught in bio classes in your state’s public schools outside the college towns & magnet schools. Look at your local bio textbooks. And if you find what I think you’ll find, make a stink. Involve the PTA, other parents, the local paper. All the bad guys need is good folks’ silence.

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ehkzu - 5:16 AM ET August 15, 2006 (#62841 of 79737)

Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans

NYTimes article, August 15, 2006:

>In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States & 32 European countries were asked whether to respond “true,” “false” or “not sure” to this statement:

>“Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001.

>The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false & the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science.

>Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement. The ranking was as follows, from highest to lowest level of acceptance of science:

>Iceland Denmark Sweden France Japan Britain Norway Belgium Spain Germany Italy Netherlands Hundary Luxembourg Ireland Slovenia Finland Czech Republic Estonia Portugal Malta Switzerland Slovak Republic Poland Austria Croatia Romania Greece Bulgaria Lithuania Latvia Cyprus United States Turkey

Of course, with all due respect to the fundies who flock to what they blasphemously call "churches" every Sunday, where they proceed to work against pretty much everything Christ taught, & to the intellectual parasites who lead them, this will seem a great triumph.

They'd invert this stack to show how with their invaluable help we've almost reached the height of enlightenment enjoyed by Turkey, Iran, Hezbollan Lebanon, Sudan, & other equally bright lights on this suffering planet.

But from the point of view of anyone whose thinking can actually be differentiated from that of a chimp (i.e. analytic vs. associative) they've only succeeded in making the country I love into the laughingstock of the civilized world. Of course the race to the bottom isn't over. Destroy America's education system a little more & we may yet surpass whoever currently holds the "most backward" crown.

Go Christianist Taliban. Sis boom bah.

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ehkzu - 1:51 PM ET August 15, 2006 (#62863 of 79737)

Science is no more anti-Christian than a bicycle is anti-fish

Jyrsmith0 made a good point earlier:

>jyrsmith0 - 12:03 PM ET August 15, 2006 (#62934 of 62935)

>…I teach Chemistry & it becomes almost frightening to me how I can demonstrate my students’ lack of Science knowledge when I begin to address the Evolution vs. Creation issue. However, unlike a lot of my fellow colleagues, I do believe in a creator & I am Christian. I see no conflict in saying that God created Heaven & Earth by The Big Bang...

This is why I tell people I’m not an Atheist. Dictionaries pretty much define "Atheist" as someone who responds to the question “Do you believe in God” by saying “No” (Agnostics say “I’m not sure”). But I say “There was a word in your question I don’t get. What is 'God'" ?

Because you can’t define or describe “God” empirically. And since science is nothing more or less than codified empiricism, science has nothing to say about “God” one way or another.

So as a purely inductive thinker I can’t be an Atheist (or an Agnostic either).

First, it’s a negative definition. It would be like calling me a non-student, or a non-Chevy owner, or a non-Russian. All true but all non-illuminating.

Second, the term has no practical import. An Islamofascist would make no distinction between me & the most pious Amish farmer. To him/her we’re both Infidels who should be killed on the spot. Nor does it say anything about my philosophy of life. There are Atheists who live like saints, others whose behavior landed them in San Quentin. (ditto professed Christians I might add.)

"Atheism" isn't a philosophy. It's a biased term, just as "miscegenation" is (coined by Southern racists to fram mixed-race marriage as "wrongful racial intermarriage"), or a racial slur like "K...ke." [sorry for the ellipses--the NYTimes won't let me use a racial slur even in this context. So I can't quote extensively from, say, Huckleberry Finn either. Ain't PC wonderful?]

What I believe has nothing to do with a word I don’t understand, pro or con, & which can’t be defined scientifically, pro or con. Attempts at definition just wind up with tautologies shaped like Ptolomean epicycles.

Nonetheless I know a lot about religion, having been raised Episcopalian, & having married a devout Mormon Republican (but I repeat myself) decades ago, with whom I go to church every Sunday.

And from that knowledge the first question I usually have for Creationists isn’t “Why do you reject science?” --since from a religious viewpoint science is only the study of “How God Did It” as Jyrsmith0 rightly implies. Instead, my first question is “When did you reject Christ?” since the priorities & mindset of the Creationists exactly oppose the form & substance of the great Jewish reformer they pretend to follow.

Christ found his fellow Jews obsessed with the Word & forgetful of the Spirit, without which the Word is an empty chalice. He found them self-proud & failing to see their kinship with others—remember the Pharisees’ prayer? Christ said exactly nothing about homosexual marriage, abortion, evolution, Terry Schiavo, the inerrancy of the Bible, or pretty much anything else the Fundies obsess about.

Instead He stressed our kinship with the least among us, our obligation to help the helpless, our need to be kind. And He never gave a straight answer, instead teaching through parables that pushed his listeners to use their own gifts to seek the light rather than just sit there as little moons to His sun. And even though I still have no idea what “God” means, Christ’s mandates for our life here on Earth make perfect sense to me (even scientifically, based on what I know of sociobiology).

And using our gifts is surely part of that. If “God” didn’t want me to think, "He" sure screwed up by giving me a squillion neuronal connections. This line of attack has the advantage of not letting the Fundies frame the debate like they like to, tricky devils that they are.

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ehkzu - 10:36 PM ET August 15, 2006 (#62917 of 79737)

Springes to catch woodcocks

The twaddle Alhie posted--& which many of you spent a lovely afternoon refuting--is beside the point. What Alhie posted is Creationist PR. It's not designed to convince or convert rational, scientifically non-ignorant people. That's why it's so easy to bat it down.

But Alhie's side still won. Because across America, in a majority of public schools, evolution is no longer taught.

No, I'm not talking about laws passed by state legislatures or policies promulgated by school boards. I'm talking about old-fashioned many-to-one intimidation. Of individual teachers, of principals, of textbook publishers.

Textbook publishers have been coerced into ghettoizing evolution in a chapter instead of it permeating textbooks as it should. The chapter is easily skipped over. And a majority of American biology teachers do just that, time & time again.

The principal whispers in his ear "community standards" & "don't rock the boat." You can confirm what I'm claiming by perusing the National Center for Science Education. website.

Intelligent rational people like many in this forum don't even see it happening. This isn't done in college towns. It isn't done in big cities (mostly). It's done in Red America, & it uses IDiot lists like the one Alhie posted as part of their campaign.

The result, as I posted yesterday from a New York Times article, is that America is the most science-denying nation among civilized nations. A majority of Americans now deny evolution & many of them even deny that the Earth is over 6K years old. And that's the majority that keeps electing science deniers like Bush to the White House & Congress.

They've won. As result, I predict that within a century America will become a cultural backwater that citizens of advanced nations visit for a cheap vacation while those nations use ours as a source of raw materials & ag products. And the political parasites who prey on their own supporters as well as us use stuff like Alhie's list to keep them distracted while they rummage through all our wallets & systematically degrade our educational system. Ignorant, superstitious voters are far easier to control, after all.

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ehkzu - 11:46 PM ET August 16, 2006 (#63050 of 79737)

Fromderinside, pick another example

in

>fromderinside - 3:46 PM ET August 16, 2006 (#63087 of 63103)

you said

>Beta Splendens defend their nests to the death or swim down the throat of piranha because it is in their nature.

Bettas come from SE Asia, Piranhas from the Amazon Basin. They're never met in nature. Bettas do defend their nests--mainly from female Bettas, which would eat the eggs (the males build the nests & raise the baby Bettas). But not to the death. If they saw a school of piranhas they'd swim their scales off trying to get away. Piranhas are pretty fearsome, after all (though not as much as the candiru if you're a human).

Sorry, I joined this forum to talk biology, not theology. Isn't it refreshing to actually talk biology in a biology forum instead of Creationist twaddle?

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ehkzu - 12:16 AM ET August 17, 2006 (#63055 of 79738)

Solution for science teaching: federalize education

Most advanced nations have federalized education systems with consistent national standards. We should emulate them. A centralized system with federal standards would be far more transparent & far more resistant to the stealth campaign Creationists have been mounting at the local school level for decades.

After Goldwater's defeat, America's Christian Taliban realized they'd succeed most if they worked in the darkness, like mildew, far away from the national spotlight. That way they can intimidate individual science teachers & science museum docents, get elected onto school boards by taking advantage of low voter turnout in non-national elections, focus on small town America, & thus fly under the educated class's radar.

It worked. They defend local control by appealing to the hatred of central government that has been inculcated by rich people who hate paying taxes for services they don't need themselves. Have you ever heard of a rich person who thought he had enough wealth? They exist, but they're the exception (George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates...any others?).

Even with the Publican "Borrow & Spend" Party running the federal government, they can't get away with the kind of anti-science crapola they pull at the state & local level.

It's the supperrich I worry about, not the Fundies, ultimately. The Fundies are just their unwitting foot soldiers, gulled into serving the supperrich's war on the middle & lower classes, content with the anti-homosexual, anti-abortion legislation that gets thrown them (anything as long as it doesn't cost anything). Don't look at the hand puppet. Look at the hand in the puppet.

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ehkzu - 2:28 AM ET August 17, 2006 (#63072 of 79739)

There's even surer ground from which to joust with theists

Any form of arguing about the validity of atheism/agnosticism is letting theists frame the debate. Instead, play dumb. When a theist asks you whether you're religious, agnostic, or atheist, say "Huh?" Then, when they say (most likely) "That is, do you believe in God?" Just say "Sorry, there's a word you said that I don't understand. What is a "God?" They say "Don't play semantic games." You say "I'm not playing. I. Don't. Understand. That. Word."

Then they try to define "God," which can't be defined in any manner an empiricist would be able to deal with. Really, all definitions of "God" are tautologies. I welcome all who've been labeled "atheist" & "agnostic" to bust out of the framing devices theists would like to entrap us with. Just say the truth--which is that we really, honestly, non-ironically, don't understand what they're talking about.

Except for the one about what the insomniac agnostic dyslexic does.
A. He lies awake all night wondering if there's a Dog.

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ehkzu - 3:32 AM ET August 18, 2006 (#63229 of 79740)

Convergent evolution & human origins

How about talking about HUMAN origins for a bit? This being a Human Origins forum & all. I tried to do this a few months ago & my questions got buried in a mudslide of fundie twaddle & counterarguments, but I'm a glutton for punishment, so here goes again:

1. Why do we have five fingers? This question really means Why do salamanders have five digits? Why not, say, four? Is this arbitrary, or is there some evolutionary advantage for all terrestrially originated vertebrates having five digits, from frogs to bats to cats to whales to us? Obviously if five fingers were disadvantageous we'd'a lost the problem digits or morphed the hand entirely, as did horses, birds, whales etc. We're closer to salamanders than most other vertebrates, handwise, as befits our less specialized body plan. But if five fingers neither gains nor loses us anything they're liable to stick around. I don't see us losing our individual toes even though having them separate doesn't seem to get us anything (except for handless people who've learned how to substitute their feet, I suppose). An engineer friend argues that there must be some real value to five fingers because they cost us biologically to build & maintain them. I'm not so sure--bio features tend to have inertia absent strong outside selective repro forces.

2. Why don't we have fur? I'm guessing this has to do with our skin being highly enervated, serving as a sensitive sense organ that lets us use our opposable thumbed hands to pick off parasites, for example.

3. Why do we have topknots? (i.e. hairy heads). If no fur elsewhere (other than armpits & pubes, where in both cases the hair serves as a pheremone storage/distribution point).

4. Why do males have hairy faces & females not? I don't know of any other primate that's sexually dimorphic in this manner. My guess is that the females need naked faces to convey nuanced emotions in their roles as parents & mates & general-purpose tribal reifiers, while males' main work is more solitary--hunting & gathering--and hence needed less social communication.

5. Why do we have chins & other primates don't?

I have other questions about HUMAN origins but these are a start. I'm particularly interested in hearing from any evolutionary biologists who might be on this forum.

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ehkzu - 2:18 PM ET August 18, 2006 (#63297 of 79740)

Convergent evolution & human origins pt. deux

leszekcnn & Chemist99A, I'm inclined to agree with both of you that the human traits I mentioned (5 fingers, topknots, toes, relative hairlessness etc.) are probably generally arbitrary--historical holdovers, traits linked to functional ones & the like.

For example, I've heard it claimed that we quick-evolved our big brains relative to our body mass through neotony (preservation of juvenile traits into adulthood). Salamander babies are aquatic, breathing through external gills. But when they morph into adults they become land dwellers.

However, the axolotl, a large Mexican salamander, remains in the water, external gills & all, & the explanation is apparently neotony. Likewise perhaps our relative hairlessness is linked to the relative-big-brain thing, which is of course a trait of all baby mammals.

And speaking as a scuba diver who's spent quality time exploring the most diverse habitat on Earth--the coral reefs of Indonesia--it can be hard to wrap your mind around the mind-blasting array or organisms you see down there, much less come up with an evolutionary model for everything. Yet time after time I've seen things we thought were arbitrary turn out to actually have a convergent evolutionary model.

So while five fingers seems arbitrary to me as well, I want to make sure I'm not overlooking something--at least something that made it mandatory for salamanders. As one of you rightly pointed out, recent fossil finds have revealed that the earliest amphibians had many "fingers." It's easy to see how that got reduced in more successful models, just as the millipedes' many legs got reduced to--I think--10 in crustaceans, 8 in arachnids, then 6 in the most successful arthropods, the insects.

Yet animals didn't drop below that leg count until we got to the much larger terrestrial vertebrates. Interestingly (to me at least) we see some terrestrial vertebrates experimenting with cutting the functional limb count to two--tyrannosaurus & its ilk--and to zero with the snakes of course. But these seem to be more specialized adaptations than a general advantage--snakes for predation in underground tunnels I suspect.

So early amphibians got a functional advantage from going down to five fingers but not from going below that? Because any evolutionary change is biologically expensive. A recent news item points out how much:

>“It takes more energy than all the fossil fuel people burn on the planet in a year to form one new species of plankton,” said Andrew Allen, the study’s lead researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

That's an argument for evolution only going as far as it absolutely has to go to gain a reproductive advantage, & no farther. Helps explain why humans are still so chimplike, don't it? More seriously, it helps explain why our layout accepts the highest mortality rate in childbirth of any mammal.

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ehkzu - 3:29 PM ET August 18, 2006 (#63313 of 79740)

To what degree are we the product of evolutionary convergence?

I ask questions like why 5 fingers, topknots, hairlessness etc. as details of the larger issue of evolutionary convergence. That is--to what degree are our species' characteristics the product of arbitrary, idiosyncratic happenstance, & to what degree are they due to evolutionary convergence?

I'm inclined to think that if we were able to wander about in the universe (perhaps even in the Bulk), we'd find that 99 times out of 100 the dominant life form on any planet supporting advanced life (sidestepping the point that our dominant lifeforms are bacteria & viruses, the obvious top predators here)--is

a: terrestrial (can't smelt iron underwater).·
b: erect bipedal (all ancestors tetrapods; then must free limbs for fine manipulation; elephant trunk an interesting sideshow but not sufficient; & erectness an invaluable adjunct to using our brains, since spotting predators from far away gives us more time to use our brains to outwit them).·
c: hominid (head on top, sense organs close to brain due to slow messaging along nerve pathways, eyes pointing forward for stereo vision, ears on side for stereo audition, horizontal mandibles, differentiated dentition yada yada).·
d: ...with skin color, for example, rigorously determined by amount of sunlight falling of a particular hominid at a particular latitude.

It appears to be an article of faith among many (especially people with just a liberal arts education) that we got here by accident, & aliens must look like the folk in the Star Wars cantina scene. But there's a reason why ichthyosaurs, sharks, dolphins & tuna are so similar, & if we could visit other life-bearing worlds, I think we observe similar convergence in dominant critters out there.

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Human Origins #63330 - ehkzu 4:58 PM ET August 18, 2006

Number five...number five...number five

Dang, I hadn't thought about the track record of 5-way symmetry in lower phyla like Coelenterata. I have heard speculation that there are sources of "genetic mandates" lower than what can currently see in our genome. And yes, when a species (or ancestor species) passes through a near-extinction bottleneck that sure can set not-so-useful traits in stone...

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ehkzu - 6:36 PM ET August 18, 2006 (#63335 of 79741)

Are we Devo? Yes, we are Devo!

re: jorian3l8 - 4:54 PM ET August 18, 2006 (#63409 of 63410) http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg1912 [...] "Why Doesn't America Believe In Evolution?" I posted this article earlier, but it's just as relevant here:

>Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans
>NYTimes article, August 15, 2006: In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States & 32 European countries were asked whether to respond “true,” “false” or “not sure” to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001. The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false & the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement. The ranking was as follows, from highest to lowest level of acceptance of science: Iceland Denmark Sweden France Japan Britain Norway Belgium Spain Germany Italy Netherlands Hungary Luxembourg Ireland Slovenia Finland Czech Republic Estonia Portugal Malta Switzerland Slovak Republic Poland Austria Croatia Romania Greece Bulgaria Lithuania Latvia Cyprus United States Turkey

As for why...well, I think the Fundies love that Beatles' song "Yesterday...all my troubles seemed so far away...Now it looks like they are here to stay...How I believe in yesterday."

What seems like open air & an exhilarating big sky to us seems like anarchy & moral chaos to them. They're obsessed with Dostoevsky's maxim "Without God all things are possible." And I think a lot of the older ones are suffering permanent PTSD from the Hippie Era.
As Karen Armstrong points out in The Battle for God (I think that's the title), fundamentalism is a modern movement despite its claims to being the restoration of something ancient. Metaphorically speaking it's society's autoimmune disorder. And with the burgeoning home schooling movement we're seeing tens of thousands of Americans emerging into the adult world with completely Medieval minds.

So I suppose instead of heaping scorn on them here we should be inviting them to dip a toe into modernity & keep reassuring them that moral order is possible with or without their version of God.

Actually I think it's more possible without their God. Can you really call anyone moral who's doing good for the aprés-life rewards awaiting him? Far more moral is the film noir-style goodness of the Stoic who does good without hope or expectation of reward, now or later.

And sociolbiologically speaking we're genetically programmed for goodness, more or less. Richard Wright's The Moral Animal is a wonderful exegesis of this arena at the frontiers of sociobiology. Because obviously it's adaptive for the gene pool of any social animal--especially one with such lengthy gestation & maturation periods for its young--to be good to each other, to understand the spirit of self-sacrifice, to even be willing to go to war in defense of one's tribe.

Since our mind is so RAM-based it’s easy for this genetic imperative to be misinterpreted & go awry. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there, though. And I don’t see religious institutions have any better a track record, frankly. In Les Miserables, Inspector Javert killed himself rather than face the ambiguities of the real world. His character’s suffering eloquently describes the internal war I suspect most Fundies experience, as they erect one Ptolomean epicycle after another in a vain effort to cram the real universe’s complexity into their orderly schema.

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ehkzu - 7:14 PM ET August 18, 2006 (#63338 of 79741)

1, 2, 3, 4, can I have a little more?

JStuart's link to a SciAm.com article was good--showed how the need to actually walk forced reduction of digits. Plus the article pointed out how it's much easier, evolutionarily speaking, to lose or morph something than to add something. So once you've lost the extra digits they're not likely to come back even if your species could use them again.

The article also left some room open for, probably, four or six digits. Probably not more or less--more just get in the way of efficient locomotion, less do too. Kinda like the way a living planet's sun should be a G2 star like ours--much bigger & it doesn't last long enough, much smaller & you have to get too close, leading to tidal lock & attendant horrors (plus small stars "burp" every so often due to fusion byproduct buildup in the stellar core; which burp will wipe out any life on any planet facing the star at the time.

In other words... (to the tune of the WWI soldiers' song "It's a long way to Tipperary"):

(chorus)
It's a long way from amphioxus It's a long way to us…
It's a long way from amphioxus To the meanest human cuss.
It's good-bye, fins & gill slits, Hello, lungs & hair!
It's a long, long way from amphioxus, But we all came from there!

A fish-like thing appeared among the annelids one day;
It hadn't any parapods or setae to display.
It hadn't any eyes or jaws, or ventral nervous chord,
But it had a lot of gill slits & it had a notochord.

(chorus)

It wasn't much to look at, & it scarce knew how to swim.
And Nereis was very sure it hadn't come from him.
The molluscs wouldn't own it, & the arthropods got sore,
So the poor thing had to burrow in the sand along the shore.

He burrowed in the sand before a crab could nip his tail.
He said "Gill slits & myotomes are all to no avail.
I've grown some metapleural folds, & sport an oral hood.
And all these fine new characters don't do me any good!"

(chorus)

He sulked a while down in the sand without a bit of pep.
Then he stiffened up his notochord & said "I'll beat 'em yet!
Let 'em laugh & show their ignorance; I don't mind their jeers!
Just wait until they see me in a hundred million years!"

"My notochord shall turn into a chain of vertebrae;
As fins, my metapleural folds will agitate the sea.
My tiny dorsal nervous chord shall be a mighty brain
And the vertebrates will dominate the animal domain!"

(chorus)

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ehkzu - 8:27 PM ET August 24, 2006 (#63851 of 79741)

Apparently studying human origins no longer acceptable field of study

from today's New York Times:

>Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
>Published: August 24, 2006
>Evolutionary biology--“the scientific study of the genetic, developmental, functional, & morphological patterns & processes, & theoretical principles; & the emergence & mutation of organisms over time”--has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. Government spokespeople called the omission a clerical error. However, it hasn't been fixed yet if that is the case.

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ehkzu - 2:06 AM ET March 22, 2007 (#77609 of 79741)

Human Origins anyone?

Just dropped in on this forum to see how things were going. I've been off in Australia scuba diving. Now I've returned only to find the Human Origins forum has become La Casa de Glossolalia.

Let me straighten things out.

Humans, like all other creatures great & small, are descended from bugs. Then when we die bugs descend on us. We have religion because most humans lack sufficient imagination to imagine their own non-existence. All these sad & desperate efforts to explain evolution supernaturally differ not a whit from astrology, numerology, Madame Poobah's Palmistry Parlor, Occultism, Ptolomy's epicycles, & all the other cons con artists have practiced on the gullible since Igwok was hawking genuine mastodon salve in the late Pleistocene—all stem from the fact that hope clouds observation.

Religion is perfectly compatible with evolution because science is only about observable phenomena testable through scientific method & religion isn’t. The sets have no intersection. Now can this forum go back to discussing our actual origins?

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ehkzu - 6:35 PM ET April 11, 2007 (#79538 of 79742)

Science & religion are 100% compatible From a religious point of view

God did the universe. Science is simply the study of How God Did It. Any religious belief that contradicts proven scientific findings is just another example of human fallibility--of our still imperfect understanding of God.

Just as the human race evolved from one-celled organisms that existed billions of years ago, our understanding of religion evolved from primitive magical beliefs to the ethical foundations of today's major religions.

But who denies that we still have a long way to go? Anyone who believes their religious understanding trumps proven scientific theory has set himself above God. And that would be the sin of Pride.

Science is humble--every good scientist is always willing to see his most cherished ideas overthrown if new findings mandate it. Good religion is equally humble, as Christ told us to be...always seeking to better our understanding of God & His universe. That's His universe. Not Ours.

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ehkzu - 4:15 AM ET April 12, 2007 (#79617 of 79742)

What assertion?

re:

>nightrider - 8:06 PM ET April 11, 2007 (#79550 of 79616) Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never existed. Abraham Lincoln (Dec 3,1861)

>your assertion doesn't hold water ehkzu #79538 6:35 PM ET 4/11/2007

>nor does it prove that the universe, & countless others that have detected were formulated by a supreme being? Faith doesn't cut it.

>Prove your assertion.

My answer:

"Please do not understand me too quickly." --Andre Gide
I suggest you re-read my post. If you do you'll see that everything I said was prefaced by the dependent clause "From the religious point of view..."

I never claimed that this was--or was not--my point of view. I was simply making an if-then statement, which you should recognize from any course you might have taken in logic or elementary programming.

My only assertion was that IF you were religious THEN you should revere science as the surest path to understanding God's progressively less mysterious ways.

Do you disagree with the assertion that I actually made?