What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

If chimps came b4 hominids, then why did they survive and the hominids didn't ? Wouldn't the hominids have....YKW ?....way-way too 2many ?'s still and just more & more evolutionist grasping - pinning their hopes 'cuz they wanna hold an answer. Good luck in your lifetime.

Now, do yourself a favor. Get your nose out of your Science 101 textbook and start using the common sense that....as we believers say....god gave you.

(....monkey's are not only dum but stoopit too !....isn't that enuf reason 4them to disassociate ?) 

Einstein, I hope you have a pleasant evening. It just clicked 2 here and Cookie and I got in earlier (she's watching TV....I'm looking at her right now). So, sleepytyme and we'll cross paths 2morrow........

Its their religion Lola, they have to believe we're related to the monkies! If they didn't have that belief, then they'd have to concede we were created, and believe in God. But, they really really don't want to do that. Goodnight.☺

I really wish you'd give citations. Links would be best. I had to find Tomkins columns on the Web myself. Is there a particular article you are citing?

Do ya think ?....they need to remember that Ockham's approach is much more of a guideline than a principle - 'cuz it's really ez to end up in a room without any doors.

Sweet dreams mon cherie.... 

Except...nobody says that chimps are our ancestors. Creationists are fond of saying that scientists (whom they call "evolutionists") say that chimps are our ancestors; but that's not what actual scientists say.

There is no such thing as "the unproven desperate pseudoscience" of evolution, of course. There is only the really well-supported theory of evolution as supported by the science of evolutionary biology.

Einstein99 keeps citing Tomkins. As far as I can tell, Tomkins's facts aren't wrong; his interpretations of them are wrong. I am still looking for a more definitive article by a Ph.D. scientist on Tomkins. (I am able to find an undergraduate university student who gives lots of debunkings of Tomkins's interpretations--and from the way he writes, I am inclined to think that he knows what he's talking about--but I can't expect anybody to accept his views as somehow trumping Tomkins's.)

But it seems telling that the theory of evolution hasn't been abandoned by the great mass of life scientists in view of Tomkins's results. Creationists and ID proponents have been citing facts for many years (sometimes fake "facts," and sometimes actual facts) that they thought torpedoed the theory of evolution, but somehow, the great mass of life scientists keeps sticking with it and saying that the Creationists and ID proponents just aren't doing their scientific analysis very well.

If nineteen out of twenty doctors tell you you have some disease and the twentieth says you don't, do you sit at home and feel sure that you don't? If nineteen out of twenty sports experts tell you the Patriots will beat the Raiders but the twentieth says the Raiders will win, which way do you bet (given even odds)?

Are you really going to bet against the overwhelming consensus of life scientists?

einstein99 latches onto the writings of the one out of twenty and on that basis bets against evolution. Is that really what we ought to do?

Let me tell you the essentials.

• Galileo was right
• The church was wrong
• The church had great power
• They used that power to suppress him

Gallileo was a back-stabbing jerk who brought most of his misfortune upon himself.

The scientists who developed the heliocentric model were all good Catholics.

The magisterium would not have so much as raised an eyebrow over this if it wasn't for the young Reformation which had them spooked.

The Catholic Church accomplished what was surely one of the most stunning "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" in history, since they provided the science and the scientists and still managed to look like anti science idiots. Christianity has been paying the price for it ever since.

You won't find this highlighted in red font on talkorigins, but you will in "Six Modern Myths" by Sampson, although the historical details are out there for someone who isn't just content with silly mythology.

As I said, the four points I made are indisputable, and you didn't dispute any of them. [You would look a bit silly saying that the Catholic church had not taken a dogmatically geocentric position, because that is a historical fact.]

Anyhow, back on topic, an early Christmas present - a fascinating, very readable little article on something which I have often wondered about but never found presented so clearly [The connection to this discussion is my earlier points on the extreme degree of similarity between primate proteins].

Size distributions of proteins

Readable version of figure 1 from that article

Presumably free-thinking artistic types will prefer to contemplate their navels rather than click on the link and learn something quite simple (and unthreatening to beliefs) from the work of other people. 

@MW - I pulled up the link of some blogger's critique of Stove. It's quite lengthy, but I'm sure you took the time to read it carefully. Would you care to summarize it?

@PW - you know what I've been reading...you know when I'm awake...you checking the list, you're checking it twice, you know if I've been naughty or nice...so I guess a nice Festivus for the rest of us present from you is out of the question?

@Elroch - you realize your post said nothing other than "it ain't so, it ain't so". Between you, PW and the eternal red font pleonastics of MW, you may end up a better tool for evangelism than Billy Graham.

I'm just trying to open everyone's eyes that's all. Look....and I mean look....at the study of the sciences for what it's worth. What you're reading may just be speculation dressed up as fact using some fancy words that the reader subconsciously wants to believe anywayz !

Who's writing these books you're building your knowledge from ?....and what makes you respect them ? Are they ordinary ppl w/ PhD's just trying to sell books for $ and get some attention on campus & elsewhere ? Ahhh....yeah....probably. I mean, they have bills to pay too.

From what I've learned, college is a great place to learn how to think for yourself. 'Cuz when you get out, you hafta unlearn everything you've learned there just to function in society ! Take it for what it's worth !

YKW ?....I'd really really like to find a person who'd like to go live in the trees or the mountains for a few months or more - and learn some really important stuff - like how to survive. Most these intellects ?....if you took them out there n2 the wilderness ?....they'd be dead in an hour ! If I did come from a monkey, maybe I need to go find out what I left behind. I feel this'd do me alotta good.

There's only one emotion stronger than fear. and MW ?....don't call yourself a nontheist outta fear, okay ?....call yourself one outta love.

My position is that of the present day sciences of biochemistry, genomics and evolutionary biology (or biology as a whole, which is essentially the same thing). There are many beautiful things to be learnt, and not a single one of them deserves to be insulted by attempting to bring them down to the level of religion. And nor do the great theories of physics, which have an equally solid basis in the Scientific Method.

It's surprising to me that someone can quite happily accept that someone else is better placed to make a CPU for their computer or an LCD screen than they are, but is completely unable to accept that there are people who are better placed than they are to understand say, cosmology or genetics, despite (presumably) having as little understanding of any of these things.

It is clear that what matters to such people is the personal reward. It is ok to accept that people are technologically more capable because of the reward of using equipment a person would be entirely incapable of producing, but deep knowledge of the real world provides no reward for those people who find no satisfaction whatsoever in improving their scientific understanding.

This is far from a universal attribute of non-scientific religious people. Many (possibly including most Christians in the world as a whole) are happy to give credit where credit is due, and should be respected for that.

To be frank, I feel sorry for those whose notion of truth is fundamentally based on what there is in it for them: theirs is a very distorted and blinkered view of the world.

Why, look what Feativus dumped down my chimney!:

“A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, ‘selfish’.”

Excerpt From: Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition.” Oxford University Press, 2006. iBooks.

This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/kNkmU.l

Oh Lord, the whole preface to the thirtieth edition is written like this, except it gets worse. If the whole damn book reads like this, it's going to be a long ordeal.

OTOH I read through "Fashionable Nonsense" and maintained my sanity. Could Dawkins be like the pomo's? Make something as obtuse as possible, and when no one follows it, claim it because they are stupid? Meanwhile, people who claim to follow it but can't, buy the books, attend the lectures, and keep the faith.

I'm sure this will all be a valuable use of my time, otherwise I'd be learning the Dutch defense or something.

It really depends on the college and what you go there for. You're paying a lot of money for your degree so most people know their degree fits into the establishment's requirements for possible financial/job security when they get out of college. I was in the minority of naive people who went to college to try to be more intelligent, you know, "higher learning". But mostly college is the gateway to debt. And if you start adult life in debt in the U.S., then you're on your way to success!

Such tremendous arrogance. As ignorant of the science as she is of solid state physics, yet happy to pontificate and follow it up with insults to those who know better.

For less egotistic participants, I'll point out that it is a matter of niches. They probably already know what that crucial concept means, while The_Ghostess clearly hasn't got a clue, based on her post.

Chimpanzees remain in forest canopies: the hominids that adapted to living on the ground specialised to a separate niche many millions of years ago, adapting to walking upright on the ground and then adapting further in other ways.

Chimpanzees are superior (i.e. fitter in Darwin's sense) at living in the canopy to other hominids (including us, to point out the obvious). Hominids that adapted to living on the ground became far superior to chimpanzees in that environment, many millions of years ago.

They didn't compete at all, because they were in different niches (until the unpleasant modern habit of humans to destroy forest ecosystems and leave vast numbers of species with nowhere to live, driving them towards extinction).

I was think as I was preparing to do some advent reading: why bother with a flawed, inaccurate Bronze Age relic, when I can read over 7000 atheist posts here, not ONE of which contains factual error, mischaracterization, or even gentle obfuscation?

It puts an apologist for papal infallibility to shame.

Why it is that atheists cannot back down on anything and why they defend their dogma with such ferocity is a profound psycholologic question. On this I don't care to speculate.

BTW, If Ghostess's irony is lost upon the materialists, I think she's a hoot. She very subtly makes points that go right over the heads of the herd of independent thinkers here.