Category Archives: evolution

Why I Used To Believe In Intelligent Design (And Why I Don’t Now)

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I came to belief in Intelligent Design on my own as a kid. I was not raised with a literal interpretation of the bible, and so when I first heard about evolution, it made sense. In my mind at the time, God was not wasteful, and it made sense that if he wanted to both populate the earth with animals and get to people, his obvious intended end point, then he would naturally re-use existing forms. If you have apes and want to get to man, why wouldn’t you just shave the hair a bit, adjust the spine, and increase the brain size?

We didn’t get a lot of evolutionary theory in school, and so I was not confronted with the mechanisms of evolution. This made belief in Intelligent Design possible for me, and the idea that God was the force behind evolution offered no cognitive dissonance.

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Abiogenesis, Evolution, Faith

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As usual, I am going to talk about something I am by no means an expert on. However, I have too often had conversations about evolution of late, and almost always they cause me no end of annoyance because the person discussing the topic does not understand what they are saying, and the concept of God as the agent of things is being presented in articles like this (which I have not as yet read, I merely read a post on Why Evolution Is True about the topic, but this post of mine is not tied to either piece, and I will read both later) with no justification. As well, there is a flurry of late of speculation as to the origins of life on earth. I do not plan on deconstructing Rabbi Jacobs’ article or commenting on Dr. Coyne’s comment on it. I provide them as links and nothing more, though I suggest you read both.

Evolution does not answer the question of how life appeared on the earth. Evolution is about the process of living things changing as the generations pass. It is a powerful theory that holds up time and time again to scrutiny, but asking evolution to explain why there is life on earth would be like asking the FCC’s policies on acceptable use to justify why there is radio broadcasting. Evolution refers to the way living things change, it does not posit on the topic of how living things got living in the first place. But it’s a common attack of evolutionary theory. It will go something like this:
 
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Teaching The Controversy (or Why I Am Not A Public School Teacher)

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Good morning, class. Timmy, get your finger out of your nose.

Today, I am going to teach the controversy. We are beginning a new unit and we are going to learn all about how much life has changed, the way that it changes, and how truly amazing this whole thing is. That is an area of science called evolution, and it’s really a brilliant and beautiful theory. However, I also need to Teach The Controversy.

You see, kids, science answers questions. Who here remembers the experiment we did last week? That’s right, Jenny, we took a beaker half full of hot water and a beaker half full of cold water, and we measured their temperatures. Then we talked about what we thought would happen when we mixed them together and we used our science brains to figure out what would happen. Then we mixed them in a bunch of different ways and we found out the answer, and it matched up with some of our ideas, but not all of them, right? Well, class, that is science. It looks at the natural world and struggles to find the answers to our questions.

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The Legs Of The Whales

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I had a rather interesting conversation with someone close to me last night who I have always known to be one of the faithful. She explained that she had finally come to a point in her life where she believed in a loving and actively involved creator, but that the particular dogmas of her faith had long since fallen flat with her, and that she looked at so much of the theology as ridiculous rubbish. This made me happy. However, she then expressed that she similarly couldn’t believe other stories, like how we came from apes. This made me sad.

The near-perfect lack of understanding of evolution held by the masses frustrates me, because the lack of understanding leaves doubt in their minds. It was this same frustration that led to Boy Infidel and I starting this blog; reason is beautiful, and ignorance is unfortunate, and we wanted to do all in our power to promote the rational.

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The Eyes Have It

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(The usual caveat applies to this piece. I am not an expert on the eye, and have at best a layman’s understanding. This is not a post that will contain absolute factual bloop-a-dee-doo about the eye, so inaccuracies they are to be expected, and if you know better than I about anything I say here, by all means please correct me in the comments. The inspiration for this posting was reading the section on Tarsiers in Richard Dawkins’ delightful The Ancestor’s Tale, which if you are intrigued by evolution and fascinated by the tree of life, I highly suggest you read.)

The more you learn about eyes, the more you realize just how cool we are. Eyes are just essentially packages of these weird thingies that respond to electromagnetic waves, and the brain takes note of which thingies are reacting and creates for us a representation of that electromagnetic input in what we determine is color. Because we generally have blue, green, and red thingies, meaning receptors that react to the waves at frequencies that we associate in our brains with those colors, we see the world in shades of those three. We don’t (as a rule) have thingies that react to extremely long waves like radio waves, and we don’t have thingies that react to extremely short waves like ultraviolet, and so we simply don’t see those colors.

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The Missing Links

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Okay, lemme make this perfectly clear. There are none. Or, by contrast, you could probably just as easily say that everything throughout the history of life on the planet that has a living descendant is a missing link. It’s one of those common misconceptions that really annoys me, and I’m going to tell you why.

The “missing link” tag comes from this ridiculous notion that “evolutionists” (read: people who value the science of evolution over the fairy tales of faith) need to prove that we descended from primates by finding an ape-man somewhere who fills in the gaps. Because the fairy folk are devoted to their dogma in direct contradiction to any and all facts that get in the way, no amount of transitional fossils will matter. This is the ape-to-man version of shouting SHOW ME THE CROCODUCK as loud as you can in a debate.

PZ Myers wrote a review of some information on his blog, and I thought I’d link to it as a treat to all of you, my loyal readers who are wondering why I have been so quiet of late. I’ll write another more me-focussed post in a few minutes updating you all on my life (cuz I’m so darned interesting), but I enjoyed this post from PZ because it mirrored two conversations I’ve had in the holidays with people where I tried to make them understand that there is no missing link. Enjoy!

Jim

Sea Babies Of The Sea

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Misunderstanding around evolution is way too common, and has been a bit of a theme of mine of late. I was just reading this exceptional article, The deep can not be home for everyone from the Southern Fried Science blog, and my mind wandered once again to the topic of evolution and how it is misunderstood. So I thought I’d write a little about it using the deep blue sea as a setting.

We are damn near certain that at some point, after many countless generations of life on land, certain mammals made their way back to the oceans. Dolphins and whales may look a lot like the rest of the ocean’s denizens, but there are a lot of very important differences, such as the way their hips move. Sharks swim with a side to side action similar to every other fish, but dolphins and whales don’t bend that way. They move in an up-down manner, a leftover from their days on land. The image many people have is of a group of mammals who spent more and more time in the water, and as a result, got better and better at swimming until eventually their descendants evolved into some sort of proto-dolphin.

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How The Fishies Left The Water

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I honestly can’t recall where I read it, but this story provides one of the most annoying and pervasive misconceptions about evolution. There’s this fish. We’ll call him John Q. Fish. John Q. Fish one day flopped out onto the land and went, “Gosh, it’s neat up here.” Then John Q. Fish flopped back and he told his kids about his amazing adventure on the land. The kids all went, “Gosh, that’s totally cool!” and a few of them tried it. Maybe some of them died, maybe a few flopped out and, like their dad, flopped immediately back in, but maybe some of them had a few extra seconds on the land. And then their kids were able to last longer and on and on, and so it goes until one day a fish was able to live on land.

Bullpuckie.

Evolution isn’t driven by want. It’s an easy mistake to make, one that seems to happen all the time when people talk about evolution. But it’s a misdirection. In order for a fish to survive on land, it would need lungs, which are not something you can just grow because it would be really cool to live on land. But we also know that it happened; at some point some fish had lungs and was able to hoist him-or-herself out of the water and see what the whole “land” thing was like. So the question is, how did it happen? The answer lies with animals like Tiktaalik.

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Laying Down The Ground Rules

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Once upon a time, we were pretty much all sure that some kind of creator invented us. I have never heard of a system of faith (though it’s possible this is just my ignorance) that does not have it’s own take on how we got here. Some of those creation myths are remarkably interesting, but that hardly changes the truth. They’re stories we told to try to know the unknowable. But we know stuff now, and those myths seem laughable.

We know, for example, that there was a big bang. Believing in the big bang is not an act of faith. It is believing in something that we may not directly see, but it is based on the best understanding of all the known information. We can come up with tests to confirm the concept, and they are time and again proving to be accurate and further cement the fact of the big bang. The amount of evidence at this point is harshly in favor of the big bang. Would it be impossible to find evidence that disproved it? Absolutely. But that evidence would have to conform to the existing evidence and provide an even clearer explanation. We don’t get dumber, we get smarter. Current work in physics tells us that there was no need for a creative force to trigger the big bang, that it was an inevitability.

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Genes, Genes, The Magical Fruit

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Many years ago, my then-wife’s adoptive mother snapped at me about the topic of Sickle-cell disease (SCD). She told me that she had SCD, and that it was an example of how the government of the United States had silent intentions on killing off blacks because they’re very susceptible to SCD and there was no studies being done to find a cure. At the time, I didn’t have any real knowledge on the subject and wound up essentially listening to her but knowing she was mistaken on the subject. However, it’s an interesting example of one of the aspects of evolution that I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about, so it serves as a good starting point.

SCD is a genetic issue, and it’s an adaptation that has a seriously positive payoff. You see, people with only a single sickle-cell gene are much better equipped to survive malaria. Sure, your lifespan gets cut shorter and there are some serious health issues that go hand in hand with it, but it’s a hell of a lot more genetically advantageous than dying in childhood with malaria, and from a pure evolutionary perspective, people who die as children do not have the potential to be parents. If a genetic abnormality causes death in middle age and prevents death in childhood, then the odds are greater that the person in question can live long enough to pass on their genetics.

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