45% of Americans are Morons

[Odin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

Humans and the great apes came from a common ancestor.

[phylogenetic nit-pick]
Human ARE great apes.
[phylogenetic nit-pick]

[Odin]

I'm not a relativist either. I don't condon ToE on the basic premises. I just have a strong spiritual belief that human beings were created by God which leads me to believe that we did not evolve from lower life forms. I could be wrong, and if I were shown proof that I was I would admit it. But like I said, all the proof that I've seen shows that it's possible that we evolved from lower life forms, not that we did.

WARNING! WARNING!

OCKHAM'S RAZOR VIOLATION!

[Jon Miller]

you do know that Ockham's Razor is not something holy in science, unlike say energy conservation

it fails to be true occasionally, it is just a useful tool

not something to have a final say

Jon Miller

[Mr. Harley]

Ok, Kid, I'm back - you are getting my lunch break tonight.

The point about humans being Great Apes is largely correct, just like some people argue that Birds are actually dinosaurs (phylogenetically that is). However, to get back to your point.

Chimps and humans share - focus on this - 98% of our genetic code. Think about that, and consider it. Ninety-eight f*cking per cent. Now, some intelligent design types claim that God just reuses the code? Excuse me. That's like our theistic evolutionists. If God can reuse the genetic code, it only takes one step to say - evolution.

Now, you'll grant me that the similarity of 98% is not going to be coincidence. I don't know how many silly zeros that is a one in X-gazillions chance. So now you have two choices. God essentially said, OK, I need genes to make these work, and I will create chimps and humans seperately, while making them so similar that AIDS will cross species and become a scourge on mankind.

Now you have a problem. Besides that, you have various kinds of radioactive dating that shows that life dates back roughly 500 million years - actually a little bit longer than that, but I don't find monoculture of bluegreen algae very interesting. Fossils of Homo sapiens have been dated over 100,000 years ago, and in fact are pushing twice that.

Now, if you challenge the dating, go walk into an active nuclear reactor core. Same science, based on the facts of radioactive decay. If you won't, because you don't want to die from radiation poisoning - exactly. We are constantly refining radioactive dating, and narrowing the plus and minus. But life existed a really long time ago, and humans long ago. This is a relatively short duration geologically, but still more than 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

So you premise humans just suddenly appeared. God decided to create two of them 195,000 ago. He borrowed Chimpanzee DNA to use to make man, and that is why they are similar. Forget about the fact that there are fossils of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and all those bothersome and extinct "ape-men." Forget about the DNA drift, and the fact the DNA similarities and mathematical analysis are consistant with evolution, forget about the precursor species. God created all those just to confuse us - practice with - name your reason prior to creating us, and carefully made sure none were left to confuse us. Oh, but he left the fossils.

While Occam's Razor is correctly identified as a principle, not a law, in science, do you start to see the absurdities necessary to have non-evolutionary Intelligent Design? This does not preclude God from meddling in evolution, I mentioned just one of many critical mutations (the jaw muscles weakening) without which man does not exist.

Identify that agent as sheer random mutation, or identify it as God choosing those mutations necessary to create man. Your choice, that is the "why" element, which as I stated before, the Science of Evolution does not address. That is for Religion and Philosophy. What's truly sad are the fundamentalists who are so blinded, so narrow in their faith that they cannot see God's hand in evolution. That is a pity.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Spiffor
It depends. Science is not inherently a belief system, but an individual can become a zealous believer in what science says. I've seen people vigorously saying that the Big Bang was The Truth (non-scientists, obviously).

That's true. When somebody is crazy enough he can have an unshakable belief in anything, such as the Earth is flat.

Originally posted by Spiffor
Actually, I would even differentiate between the postulates and the religious beliefs . A postulate is convenient, while a religious belief is holy.

One may think only the scriptures of a religion are scared, but it appears that even interpretations of such scriptures can be inerrant as well, creating a great many different sects. What's worse is these sects can and do fight each other.

Originally posted by Spiffor
If the scientific community becomes unhappy with a postulate for whatever reason, it will change or remove it. Such a thing cannot be said for most religious beliefs.

Usually a postulate is not discarded, but rather ad hoc hypotheses are used to explain things not covered by the theory in question. Or maybe a newer, more complete theory will arise to take its place.

Originally posted by Spiffor
However, science can be a victim of its own success, and can its "vulgar" form can become gospel to some.

I agree that is a real danger. What's more dangerous is some cynic opportunists can exploit this ignorance to their own advantage. Some cults, such as Scientology, are cloaked in pseudoscience gibberish-speak. Many more people use the same sort of mumble jumble to peddle their dubious wares, esp. on the Web.

Originally posted by Spiffor
1. Some people (plenty of non-scientists) will strongly believe in current famous scientific conclusions. I think this is the danger SpencerH warned about: any guy with a schmock, a diploma and good communication skills can have followers that will zealously defend his theses (I'll give you more details about the guy if you ask me).

I think this sort of scam also exploits the average people's naive trust in authority. Having a "Dr" in front of your name somehow makes you much more believable, no matter what the suject is. What's worse is there are a lot of paper mills that will gladly sell you a piece of paper for a small fee.

So who's this guy and what does he do?

Originally posted by Spiffor
2. There is also another kind belief linked to science, which is more complex to explain. I hope I'll be clear. It's the belief that the scientific method has the potential to explain everything in the universe. That's what St Leo (and probably quite a few polytubbies) believe in.

That seems to be a reasonable but probably unprovable belief. I reckon that is based on simple extrapolation and a reasonable belief that this universe is uniform (i.e. what works in one place will also work in another place with similar conditions). So far science has been extraordinarily successful in explaining nature, this feeling is understandable.

While science is a tool, it has so far been a fantastic one. It is probably the only tool we have to understand nature objectively.

Originally posted by Spiffor
But even though science does work for many things, it has a great limitation: we cannot have a perfect understanding of the phenomena we study.

It probably has something to do with the characteristics of this universe. For example, measurements are not perfect, there is always an element of approximation to them. For example, I am 177cm tall, but that is just an approximation. The real measurement probably is somewhere between 176.5cm and 177.5cm, but without an infinite precision, the accuracy of this measurement can always be increased, at least in theory.

However approximations are all we ever need. When a structural engineer calculates the dimensions of steel reinforced concrete columns for a building, does he need accuracy to the 10th place after the decimal? Surely not, and doing so will be just a waste of time.

Originally posted by Spiffor
Measurements and mathematics are human inventions. They're completely abstract. They have nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with our way to approach reality.

Some mathematicans, including Marvin Minsky, argue that mathematics underlies reality. IOW, while mathematics is a completely artificial construct, it accurately reflects reality.

Though we are getting to the mushy grounds of philosophy here . Perhaps the best way to approach this is with a "craftsman's mindset." If mathematics works as a tool, great. Keep using it.

Originally posted by Spiffor
I used these examples on purpose: there are plenty of unknowns in meteorology and in gravity, yet science can provide fairly good models already. That's infinitely better than what religion managed in millenia Does science currently give perfect models? No. Does it give workable models? Yes.

Meteorology is inexact probably has a lot to do with chaos, while gravity is just strange.

Originally posted by Spiffor
If people remain aware that science is a tool for us to better understand our surroundings, then they're not "believers" in science.
OTOH, if people believe that Science is the One Key that can explain our whole universe, then they're believers.

If this understanding is limited to mechanisms ("how this works," "what causes this"), science seems to be the best candidate to understand our whole universe by a wide margin.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
God created all those just to confuse us - practice with - name your reason prior to creating us, and carefully made sure none were left to confuse us. Oh, but he left the fossils.

Oh yeah, the Bill Hicks "god is a joker" skit

[Mr. Harley]

UR - I've heard of it, but never seen it. Do you have any links to it, or know of a DVD/Tape it's on?

[Urban Ranger]

A Google search reveals this transcript. It starts a bit down, probably with

Fundamentalist Christianity - fascinating. These people actually believe that the bi.., er, the world is 12 thousand years old. Swear to God

I can quote the whole skit here, but there are some words that couldn't get pass the autocensor, so you might as well visit the site. Enjoy

[Mr. Harley]

Thanks - some pretty funny stuff there. I wish I could see it.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Chimps and humans share - focus on this - 98% of our genetic code. Think about that, and consider it. Ninety-eight f*cking per cent. Now, some intelligent design types claim that God just reuses the code? Excuse me. That's like our theistic evolutionists. If God can reuse the genetic code, it only takes one step to say - evolution.

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr05.html

Ah, so it's evidence you want. Perhaps you would like to look at this:

Evidence for human relationships to the other apes.

Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two mitochondrial genes, ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species here, or they differ in only one species. Those are uninformative about relationships, so I have removed them, leaving 76 nucleotides that make some claim. I'll let you look at them for a while.

[See link for chart]

I've marked with a plus sign all those sites at which gibbon and orangutan match each other, and the three African apes (including humans) have a different base but match each other. These sites all support a relationship among the African apes, exclusive of gibbon and orangutan. You will note there are quite a lot of them, 24 to be exact. The sites I have marked with numbers from 1-6 contradict this relationship. (Sites without numbers don't have anything to say about this particular question.) We expect a certain amount of this because sometimes the same mutation will happen twice in different lineages; we call that homoplasy. However you will note that there are fewer of these sites, only 22 of them, and more importantly they contradict each other. Each number stands for a different hypothesis of relationships; for example, number one is for sites that support a relationship betwen gibbons and gorillas, and number two is for sites that support a relationship between orangutans and gorillas (all exclusive of the rest). One and two can't be true at the same time. So we have to consider each competing hypothesis separately. If you do that it comes out this way:

[See link]

I think we can see that the African ape hypothesis is way out front, and the others can be attributed to random homoplasy. This result would be very difficult to explain by chance.

Let's try a statistical test just to be sure. Let's suppose, as our null hypothesis, that the sequences are randomized with respect to phylogeny (perhaps because there is no phylogeny) and that apparent support for African apes is merely a chance fluctuation. And let's try a chi-square test. Here it is:

These are all the possible hypotheses of relationship, and the observed number of sites supporting them. Expected values would be equal, or the sum/7. There are 6 degrees of freedom, and the sum of squares is 57.8. P, or the probability of this amount of asymmetry in the distribution arising by chance, is very low. When I tried it in Excel, I got P=1.25*10^-10, or 0.000000000125. Might as well call that zero, I think.

[See link]

The difference is significant. Now the question is how you account for it. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the phylogeny involves the African apes, including Homo, being related by a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans or gibbons. How about you?

By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection. But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.) Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what? It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function, so similar design is not a credible explanation.

God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of common descent.

This is probably one of the best summations I've ever read of human/ape relation. It's not just our relation to the chimp, but the relation amongst all the primates.

I'd also recommend this page for the evidence of fossils:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

I don't know what possible explanation people could have for the fossil record without evolution, unless they take the "God's a Liar" track.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
So who's this guy and what does he do?

He's famous in Germany and in some other European countries for championing the cause of vitamins. He basically says that vitamins are a wonder drug, which is disputed by many among the medical community.
To my lay eyes, it looks like a valid scientific controversy. But it has escaped scholarly hands, because the guy constantly advertises (and the systematic use of his head and name in his ads makes him look like a kind of guru).
Many laymen firmly believe him, and accuse his opponents for being either close minded or bribed by the pharmacorps. His believers are organized in non-profit associations, which produce vitaminic cocktails.

I took on purpose the example of somebody who isn't a blatant crook (I cannot judge whether vitamins really are as healthy as he pretends), but who has a devoted following. The guy has a huge ego, and some followers are heavily involved in their belief. It doesn't have the markings of a scientific belief in his theories, but indeed the markings of a mystical one.

Though we are getting to the mushy grounds of philosophy here . Perhaps the best way to approach this is with a "craftsman's mindset." If mathematics works as a tool, great. Keep using it.

Yes. As a scientist myself (social scientist, but I've studied in the tradition closest to the method of "hard science"), I believe that science is the best explanation method mankind has devised so far, and we should stick with it. And it's all right as long as we remain aware it's merely a tool, no matter how good.

If this understanding is limited to mechanisms ("how this works," "what causes this"), science seems to be the best candidate to understand our whole universe by a wide margin.

In comparison to religions: absolutely. There is no possible comparison.
In comparison to what human ingenuity might develop in the coming centuries or millenia: doubtful.
This is why I think science is the best method we devised so far, but I caution people not to give science even more merit than it deserves. It's a very good and useful tool, but it's not the One Perfect thing that can lead us to The Truth (with capitalised T).

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
While Occam's Razor is correctly identified as a principle, not a law, in science, do you start to see the absurdities necessary to have non-evolutionary Intelligent Design?

I don't think any belief is absurd when trying to answer the question of how we got here. We're dealing with a spiritual matter. There's a difference between spiritual and absurd, unless you are one of those people who believe that spirituality is always absurd.

[Kuciwalker]

I don't think any belief is absurd when trying to answer the question of how we got here. We're dealing with a spiritual matter.

Last time I checked, cosmology and biology were scientific matters, not spiritual ones.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Last time I checked, cosmology and biology were scientific matters, not spiritual ones.

Then we aren't talking about biology or cosmology.

[Kuciwalker]

Last time I checked, those two fields encompass the study of how we got here.