Archive for July 25th, 2008
Evolution Poll
Recent debunkings of Creationist flaws leads me to ponder how many people believe in Evolution and what relation these results have with belief in gods. Thus I have constructed the following poll. It only covers atheism / theism and unless I have complaints it will stay that way. If you are a deist I would say to go with the theist grouping since deism is a vague subset of theism. Likewise with agnosticism, if you are an agnostic atheist put yourself in the atheist groupings, and agnostic theists go in the theist group. Very simple!
Loading ...It would be interesting to see what the results turn out to be. Obviously I have some predictions about atheist / Evolution but there may be some people who doubt it. Likewise I suspect the majority of theists believe in Evolution, but then it is usually Creationists who come to this blog so perhaps not.
I should also point out that I’ve added the Poll widget to the sidebar so the latest poll is always shown at the side nomatter which page you are browsing.
Evolution Is Not A Fraud!
This is a general response to the “Debunking Atheists” blog post entitled “Evolution is a fraud!“. As with all posts made by Creationists, it contains a gross misunderstanding of basic Evolutionary theory, and whilst I’m no Evolutionary Biologist, I know the basics enough to correct Dan on it.
From the article:
1. It’s not science. You cannot observe, test and repeat the ever-changing ideas that are little more than wild speculation.
WRONG. It certainly is science, and it has been observed[1] and is being experimented on[2] as we speak. In fact, Richard Lenskis experiment[3] has frozen instances of E-coli every 500 generations, meaning he can replay the Evolution of past generations to see if the same things happen. If anything, the “ever-changing ideas” prove it is a science. since science is always updated with new evidence coming in. Evolutionary theory has changed much since the days of Darwin, but the core observation that species have evolved has remained and is unchallenged (successfully) to this day. If you really think ever-changing ideas cannot be science, then the theory of gravity is not a science, neither is our understanding of particle physics, or any chemistry subject. We can never really know everything about any subject since the infinite variations we could test under are just too many.
2. It devalues real science. Chemistry, physics and biology don’t have the same problems of legitimacy because they are real sciences, not philosophical wannabes trying to appear legit.
WRONG. Firstly it should be pointed out that Evolution is a part of biology, so you are contradicting yourself by saying that biology is a real science and Evolution is not. As I have explained in the previous paragraph, Evolution is a real science and if you actually looked for the evidence you would find it. There are no so-called “problems of legitimacy” in Evolution. Everything we can explain has been explained, and if something comes along that isn’t compatible with current Evolutionary theory, the reason will be found and the theory changed to fit the evidence. Likewise, if evidence is found that contradicts Evolution and can be proved, Evolution would be finished. Unfortunately, this would leave us stuck because we would have to explain all the evidence we currently have for Evolution and change / variation using another theory. No current alternatives have even come close.
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