©2008-2010 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.…We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49) , author of Last Chance to See
One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.
~ Michael Anissimov 1995
A sabre tooth tiger was chasing two cavemen. One shouted to the other “We’ll never outrun this tiger.” The other panted back “I don’t have to. I only have to outrun you.”
~ Anonymous
All throughout the fossil record and life, we don’t find one of these; a Crocoduck. There’s just nothing like it!
~ Kirk Cameron (born: 1970-10-12 age: 39)A crocoduck is a duck with a crocodile head. Mr. Cameron, the former child actor and Christian evangelist, seems to think the absence of such creatures slam dunk debunks evolution and proves the Christian creationist view. Huh? Buy a crockoduck tee shirt.
Only the extinct don’t change.
~ Chris Chandler
At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved — if it can be achieved at all — within the next few hundred years.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90) 1983
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)
An American [new world] Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God. There are also many barbarian tribes who cannot be said with any truth to believe in what we call God: they believe indeed in spirits or ghosts, and it can be explained, as Tyler and Herbert Spencer have shown, how such a belief would be likely to arise.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)I find it infuriating that Christians refuse to acknowledge their “evidence” for god is any different than that of any other religion. If there were anything superior about Christianity, surely others would notice that. They don’t. They always champion the local religion. Christianity is just another religion. There is nothing about it that makes it superior to other religions. The claim that Christianity is superior to other religions is a groundless as claiming that Presbyterians are superior to other flavours of Christian.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man… Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designed the Ichneumonidae (parasitic wasps) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should place with mice.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)Religious people wish nature/God were kind and nurturing, so they ignore all the contrary evidence and just pretend it is.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else. It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests… Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason; it gives them something to do… One of the truly bad effects of religion that it teaches us it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68) , The God Delusion page 125
Evolution is true in whatever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68) Heat the Hornet
Religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68)
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68)
There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you’d expect if evolution were a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68)
To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68) Lament for Douglas 2001-05-14
Natural selection is engineering; sexual selection is art.
~ What Females Want and Males Will Do a PBS Nature Documentary.
It reminds me of a Monty Python routine where a guy goes into a pet store to get his fish a licence. He is told they don’t make fish licences. He replies that he has cat licence, why can’ he get a fish licence? but is told they don’t make cat licences either. So he shows the pet store owner his cat licence. “That’s not a cat licence” the owner responds, “That’s a dog licence. You just scratched out the word dog and wrote in cat.” That’s all the creationists are doing . They’ve just scratched out religion and in its place put in science.
~ Murray Gell-Mann (born: 1929-09-15 age: 80) , quantum physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969
Species without borders [blocks to invasive species spreading] means far fewer species.
~ National Geographic Invaders episode of the Strange Days on Planet Earth documentary series
If a wolf — with a time frame so short that it can almost be entirely recorded, and by means so simple that they can be mastered by illiterate people — could be transformed through selective breeding into everything from a Great Dane to a toy Pomeranian, then surely Nature, working on a time scale so much greater, could produce even more dramatic transformations — say monkey into man.
~ Adam Gopnik (born: 1956-08-24 age: 53) 2006-10-23 Rewriting Nature, Charles Darwin, Natural Novelist, The New Yorker. Artificial selective breeding is just a particularly dramatic type of natural selection, where intense interactions between species creates an environment that shapes with a strong breeding advantage to change in a particular direction.
Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage — good teaching — than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60)
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60)On the contrary, it is the creationists with an untestable hypothesis. Creationism makes no predictions. There is no telling what a god will do.
Pseudoscience known by its supporters as “scientific creationism” is strict Genesis literalism masquerading as science in a cynical attempt to bypass the First Amendment and win legislatively mandated inclusion of particular (and minority) religious views into public school curricula… Intense debates about how evolution occurs display science at its most exciting, but provide no solace (only phony ammunition by willful distortion) to strict fundamentalists.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60)
They have this absurd notion that something that occurs in the past and that is not subject to direct observation is not provable. That’s nonsense… There is a mystery as to how evolution occurs, but there is not a whole lot of doubt as to whether it occurs.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60) .
We long to situate ourselves on a benevolent, warm, furry, encompassing planet, created to provide our material needs, and constructed for our dominion and delectation. Unfortunately, this pipedream of succor from the realm of meaning (and therefore the magisterium of religion), imposes definite and unrealistic demands upon the factual construction of nature (under the magisterium of science). But nature, who is as she is, and who existed in earthly form for 4.5 billion years before we arrived to impose our interpretations upon her, greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60) , Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
~ Judith Hayes
I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
~ John F. Kennedy (born: 1917-05-29 died: 1963-11-22 at age: 46)
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)
I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)
Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (born: 1903-11-07 died: 1989-02-27 at age: 85)
Researchers proved how relatively unimportant women’s clothes are [in the dating game]. Save your expensive clothes to impress your girl friends or your prospective employer.
~ Leil Lowndes
The Fermi Paradox is an observation by the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first controlled atomic chain reaction under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, that if technological civilizations have even a slight probability of evolving, their presence should be visible throughout the universe. … The sky should be filled with the cosmic equivalent of roaring traffic and flashing neon signs. But instead we perceive a great silence.
~ Hans P. Moravec (born: 1948-11-30 age: 61) , Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
Where does your father keep his barnacles?
~ One of Charles Darwin’s children to a school friend.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 55)
The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius — master of most constructions, obeying rules far more often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 55)
There is no guarantee that our minds will intuitively understand phenomena at scales of time and space that are very different from our own experience — hundreds of millions of years, billions of light years, Ângströms… Our best science tells us that that laws of reality work very differently from those at the scales we are used to thinking so disciplines like quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, cosmology and even neuro science are deeply baffling.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 55) in an interview with Richard Dawkins
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 55)
A female human is looking for a male who can be counted on to help her raise her offspring to maturity, someone who will not abandon her and who has the resources to be useful. Thus the sexual allure of male shyness. The male is advertising, perhaps falsely, that not will he will stay faithful, but also that he could not stray even if he wanted to. Evolutionary natural selection sometimes plays a cruel trick on males, making them so shy that they cannot even approach one female.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
A modern metaphor for evolution might be American Idol. A motley random assortment of mostly untalented people present themselves to the judges. The judges winnow the pack down to an ultimate winner, who is remarkably talented. The judging process is anything but random. Imagine a world where the next generation of contestants were sired only by American Idol winners. That’s evolution. Nature does the judging and ruthlessly condemns the losers to early death for almost any imperfection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
A scientist approaches the creationism debate by asking himself “Which hypothesis best fits the observed facts?”. A creationist approaches it with an extreme double standard for judging the two sides. If he can find anything in creationism in accord with fact… If he can find anything in evolutionary theory, or in any parody of evolution, that he personally doubts… If he can find any august personage of ancient times supporting creationism… Or if he personally finds anything he does not intuitively grasp without study in evolutionary theory, he claims victory for creationism. Further he treats his judgement as a personal triumph and a vindication of his sect’s dogma, not merely of evidence for some form of intelligent creation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Aggression is common in animals. It is used to compete for food, territory, mates and to establish a pecking order. Except in rhinos, the aggression is rarely fatal. Humans have so much trouble with it because they have artificially amplified it with technology — from spears to guns to nuclear weapons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
All modern humans descended from a group of 2000 people who lived 70,000 years ago, and most of us descended from an even smaller group of 150 people. 2000 is about the enrollment of my high school. It amazing how so few people notice how alike we all are and that you can’t help but marry a not-that-distant cousin.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
An animal may experience rejection. He might persist fruitlessly, but only a human can feel doomed to be attracted only to those who will never be attracted back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Animals that do not live near the ocean live with constant sodium shortage. They will go to great lengths to seek out salt. We humans have this same salt hunger. We never needed to evolve a mechanism to tell us when we have had enough salty potato chips, and so we overconsume to the point it causes deadly hypertension.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Capitalists are neo-Darwinists who imagine humans prevail over other species by ruthlessly culling the weak and poor. They fail to notice that individual humans are puny animals. The secret of their success is intelligent co-operation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Christians imagine the primary bond is between husband and wife, yet the bond crucial to survival is the parent’s bond to his or her children, just as it is in other mammals and the birds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Consider what sort of person would be completely at home in our modern technological society. Not only would he have to thrive in this artificial environment, the environment and society he created would have be sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationism has no more right to demand equal time in science classes than evolution has to demand equal time in Sunday school.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationism is not a science. By definition a science needs to be testable and hence potentially falsifiable. Creation “science” is based on the assumption of the infalliblility of the King James bible. Such absolute certainty and dismissal of any conceivable contrary evidence disqualifies it as a science. It is a blind religious faith. On the other hand evolution is not a moral system. It says absolutely nothing about how one ought to behave.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationists claim evolution is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics (Roughly speaking, things tend to deteriorate into chaos.) The law applies only to closed systems, not planet earth whose sun constantly pumps it up with new energy. And even if it did apply, surely any new complexity would also be impossible, such as the invention of the automobile, aeroplane or computer. Clearly these are not impossible. They knew full well this argument was bogus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationists offer what they consider some flaw in evolutionary theory as proof that creationism must be correct. That logic is flawed. It is as if they had presented evidence that Obama is not president of the USA as conclusive proof that Kevin Bacon is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationists tell me all the dinosaurs died out because there was not room enough for them in the ark. However, most dinosaurs were quite small.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Creationists tell me God planted all the trillions of fossils in the world to give the illusion the world was 4 billion years old and dinosaurs once roamed the earth. If God went to all this effort to fool me, wouldn’t it be rude to refuse to go along with His charade? Surely He would not lie to us without some infinitely wise reason for wanting us to believe the earth is 4 billion years old.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Darwin says that fitter plants and animals tend to reproduce more offspring than plants and animals with defects that harm their survival and reproductive success. How could it be otherwise? It is a tautology, just the definition of fitter. This means over time plants and animals will gradually adapt to survive in any given environment. It is like a process of always eating the darkest jellybeans from a bowl. Eventually you have only white ones left. How could it be otherwise? Further we know this is so because have watched the process greatly speeded up when we create artificial environments for guppies, small decorative tropical fish, for example, that require bright colours for survival when we humans interfere with the least colourful males from breeding. Those who reject evolution don’t understand it, or more commonly, don’t want to understand it. They prefer to believe some straw man caricature of it. Christians will still bet on the horse with the best bloodlines, while pretending they don’t believe in the evolutionary selection process that created him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Darwin’s geological theory explains circular coral atolls. The biblical “theory” of a very young earth has no explanation. A “theory” that explains nothing, predicts nothing and that is not even consistent with observation is by definition not even a theory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Do those people who talk of “conquering nature” ever stop to think what it would be like if they succeeded.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Driven by desires shaped by evolution when man was a hunter gatherer in a world where calories were hard to come by, Americans now get most of their calories from soda pop.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Drug addicts and alcoholics can be so frustrating. These self-indulgent, immature brats just don’t get it that the long term consequences of a temporary indulgence are suicidal. That is exactly how environmentalists feel about Conservatives, Republicans, politicians and businessmen who refuse to acknowledge the long term environmental consequences of their actions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Even as recently as the 1950s, we were using horses in my city to deliver milk in glass bottles and ice for iceboxes. If we encounter an alien technological civilisation, it will likely be millions of years more advanced than hours. We will be far more dazzled than nomadic shepherds from 0 AD marvelling at an iPhone.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Even though he suffered from ill health, Darwin was able to visit many of the unspoiled ecosystems of the world, including the coral reefs. No one can do that anymore.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Every aquarist knows that fish will not breed unless you get the conditions just right including light, water pH, hardness, salinity, depth, food, space, plant cover, rock shape… There are many fish species so picky that no one has ever managed to accurately enough mimic their native environment to induce them to reproduce. Fish are much more sensitive to changes in the environment than lay people would ever imagine. If we humans recklessly change the conditions in the wild even a small amount, fish will stop breeding and go extinct.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Every male bird knows the best way to attract a mate is to build a nest. Human males waste time with red sports cars that primarily attract younger males.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution boggles the mind because of the huge time scales involved and its glacial slowness. For example, life has been evolving on earth for about 3 billion years. The Grand Canyon started forming relatively recently, about 17 million years ago. The canyon descends 1.61 km (1 mile) deep. To do that it only had to erode away only 59 microns (2,322.83 microinches) each year, about half the thickness of a sheet of paper. Life had 200 times as long to evolve its marvels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution demands that young humans accept whatever their mothers tell them without question. Logic has nothing to do with it. That is why religious belief is so impervious to the usual techniques of logical persuasion. Religion is more akin to a phobia than a belief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution has encouraged rat curiosity even when that curiosity leads rats to take significant risks because curiosity leads to knowledge of new resources to exploit and improved knowledge of the terrain to use to evade predators.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution has had a staggering amount of time to produce its wonders. If you descended in an elevator 0.85 km (0.53 miles) deep into a salt mine, every second you would pass over sediments representing 2 million years of evolutionary change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution has seen to it that young children believe anything their parents tell them without question, be it that toadstools are poisonous, matter is made of impossibly small invisible atoms, that an elderly man lives with elves at the North Pole who sneaks into their bedrooms on Christmas eve or that there is a cruel old man with a white beard hiding in the clouds staring at their genitals. Telling lies to those without their capability to resist is a form of child abuse — dishonest manipulation with lifelong harm, even harm down through the generations. Lying to children, including feigning certainty where there is only speculation, deliberately creates crippling phobias and delusions. It is morally equivalent to systematically poisoning a child with a drug that causes schizophrenia.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution is both a theory and a fact. Contrary to the lies Christians love to tell, evolution is not a theory in the everyday sense of a hunch or a best guess, e. g. I have a theory about where the water on the kitchen floor is coming from. Scientists call those hypotheses. Evolution is a theory in the same sense as music theory. There is no doubt about which notes make up a C chord. There is no doubt that halving the length of a string bumps the plucked note up exactly one octave. Similarly there is no doubt that creatures evolved and continue to evolve. Theory, in this sense, means a mathematical model that describes and predicts observed facts. Evolution is also a fact because we have watched it happen in the fossil record, in our DNA, in artificial selection that we use to create domestic plants and animals, and in the way diseases and pests evolve resistance to our measures to eradicate them. There is no evidence for any competing explanation, including creationism. Even Pope Jean Paul conceded evolution was the best scientific explanation. Even when you explain this to a creationist, and you are sure he understands, you will catch him a day later trolling his same old “evolution is just a theory” bit of dissembling. The problem is more dishonesty that ignorance.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Evolution works extremely slowly. You have to expect serious trouble if you radically change an animal’s evironment. For humans, we have cut walking from per day day to 0. We have radically changed our diet. We have changed from living in small groups to living in giant hives called cities. We have introduced thousands of toxic chemicals. We have changed from living outdoors to living inside.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
For all but a thin sliver of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in groups of less than 1000 people. The strategies we evolved work brilliantly at the level of the village. They go hideously awry when magnified to a planet-sized group of 7,000,000,000 people, especially when technology hugely enhances the influence of an elite few.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
From the point of view of a new disease organism, our technological civilisation seems custom-tailored to help it spread. We transport diseases around the entire planet within hours on airliners; we move them around in food transported tens of thousands of miles; we congregate in tight spaces like buses, elevators and office buildings each day to exchange microorganisms. Even our greeting ritual, the handshake, exchanges more germs than had we ritually drunk each other’s urine. We have undone all we have evolved/learned in millions of years to control disease, namely live in small groups and be wary of contact with strangers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
From the point of view of non-human life on earth, humans came out of nowhere like a plague of cybernetic locusts ravaging the earth with unparalleled ferocity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
From the point of view of the gene pool, sacrificing the best and brightest to the volcano god is the worst thing a society can do. Modern societies are more practical. They sacrifice the unemployable and those with a taste for bullying and mayhem to the gods of war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Gerontology recapitulates pediatric development, only in reverse — whispy hair, loss of hair, bulging tummy, crankiness, loss of teeth, loss of ability to speak coherently, loss of ability to walk, atrophied soft muscles, loss of ability to handle solid foods, loss of bowel control…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humanity is behaving so aggressively stupidly on greenhouse gases, nuclear weapons, overpopulation, environmental destruction…, humanity fully deserves the extinction it is preparing for itself.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans are the only animal that does not have a sustainable recycling policy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans believe they own all the food on the planet and need to prevent other species from stealing it. From the point of view of other species, the food supply of earth is up for grabs, and they want a slice of the pie. When a strawberry rots, chalk one up for the fungi in this deadly resource war.…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans did 99.99% of their evolving prior to the domestication of plants and animals, let alone civilisation. No wonder our natural urges are so out of sync with our technological way of life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans drive other species to extinction by hunting, by taking over their habitat, by carrying diseases, by bringing in invasive species from afar, by competing for food, by polluting, by causing climate change… Instead of homo sapiens perhaps we should have called ourselves homo deleotus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans evolved in an environment where the optimum strategy was to eat whenever food is available and to eat as much as possible. In our modern world, this leads to obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. Christianity with its Lenten fast and Islam with its Ramadan fast may unconsciously have been trying to artificially restore the environment for which we are adapted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Humans have no more wit than tent caterpillars when it comes to slowing down reproduction when resources get tight.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
I feel so privileged to be alive on earth now, to watch a flowering of cosmic intelligence and its almost instant extinction, like a rare cactus flower that blooms for but one night.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
I look on civilisation as a sort of cactus flower, a fireworks burst, the result of a long buildup meant to last but a moment in the stillness of space.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
I wonder what possible mechanisms are possible in evolution to create large-brained intelligent creatures.~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
- appendages for manipulating objects need ever more clever wetwear.
- camouflage. Hiding from predators means creating ever more sophisticated illusions to make the creature disappear.
- size. When you have a giant body with a brain cavity that does not get thrashed around, you have the infrastructure to grow, nourish and protect a giant brain. Contrary to urban myth, you don’t need a large brain to control a large body. In other words, the ratio of brain weight to body weight does not mean much for large animals. Consider the dinosaurs. All of a giant brain can be used for thinking or something else .
- Egalitarian social structure. Those that cannot communicate are effectively ostracised and squeezed out of the gene pool. Stratified “pecking order” societies reduce the pool of who communicates with whom, and hence depress the evolution of intelligence.
I would imagine an honest creationist on studying the evidence, particularly the biology of islands would conclude that the Creator seems to have gone to an extraordinary amount of work to make it look as if species evolved over millions of years or to have set it up so that species did actually so evolve. He would be completely sure that God created the mountains and the sediments, but would have at least a sliver of doubt that He authored the King James bible — knowing how many people meddled with it over the millennia. Taking God’s word contaminated by man over God’s direct communication in the form of the creation, I would think, should be considered a slap in God’s face.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If humans were intelligently designed, surely they would not become incontinent, or senile, or toothless long before their bodies as a whole wore out.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If humans were intelligently designed, surely testicles would have some sort of armour plating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If humans were intelligently designed, surely they would have a spine properly designed for upright walking, not a recycled quadruped design.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If the kangaroo were intelligently designed, surely the young lima-bean-sized kangaroo should have emerged directly into the pouch, rather than forced to make a long journey through the mother’s hair along the outside of her body.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If we ever receive signals from an intelligent civilisation, it will most likely be much older than ours. We humans have been sending signals out for only 103 years , spreading out at the speed of light. Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Our own signals have thus reached just a tiny corner of our own galaxy. If signals from the opposite side of the galaxy reached us, they would necessarily have been sent 100,000 years ago. Of course, the civilisation that sent them might have been no more advanced than us at the time they broadcast. They may have gone extinct shortly after sending the signals, a victim of their own clever technology, just as we soon will.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
If you were watching Jeopardy, and Alex Trebek said “No, the first world war was in 1929” millions of people would write to complain. Yet when equally incorrect assertions appear on TV, in books or even in school lectures, almost nobody complains, because this is religiously protected misinformation, with even higher sacred cow status than the existence of Santa Claus. We don’t realise how ridiculous it is, because we are so familiar with the religious myths. It is just as silly as if Christians started asserting John McCain were 200 years old, and pounced on anyone who dared suggest otherwise, providing of course no evidence at all for this bizarre assertion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Imagine being an member of an ancient intelligent species living in the local Milky Way galaxy. You would be aware of earth’s rapid military evolution. You would probably not be too concerned. The math would show the evolution is so fast it will almost certainly drive humans to extinction long before they start making a mark off planet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Imagine if a rabbit evolved that liked to set fires. What a frightening creature man must have been for the other animals when he first learned to use fire!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In 1977 there was a drought on one of the Galapagos islands. The population of one of the Darwin finch species dropped to about 100 individuals. Researchers studied the survivors and discovered they all had significantly larger beaks that usual. The reason: the only food left were large hard seeds. The ordinary finches that could eat only small seeds had starved to death. Here is just one of many examples of natural selection happening right under our noses. Evolution is an observable fact.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In dramatic fiction, the most common thing humans do to aliens is kill them. We broadcast our dramas to the cosmos. We are broadcasting the message “We don’t want visitors”. Polite aliens would stay away. Predatory ones, perhaps seeking exotic food species, would follow the “scent” we laid for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In most species, the males strut, dance and decorate themselves to impress the females, but in man, it is largely the reverse. This is because, for most animals, all the male contributes is sperm. In man, the male contributes almost all his income to the raising of the young and supporting his mate. As the human two-parent family breaks down, you can expect to see a reversion in humans to the peacock pattern of male beauty and sartorial splendour.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In nature, if an animal becomes incapable of running swiftly it soon becomes lunch. There is no old age or senility. Humans suffer a much more terrible and protracted end than being eaten. They are confined and kept barely alive with non-person status, sometimes suffering for decades with no access to death by any possible means.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In nearly every species males try to prevent fellow males from breeding, but human Christians attempt to force male homosexuals not only to copulate but to sire children. What motivates this desire to propagate gay genes?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In the 1700s, war was fought by gentlemanly rules, almost as a sport, sparing civilians. It had the salutary effect of reducing the population and reducing domestic violence by attracting violent young men to their Darwinian deaths. Today, we have ruined war for this purpose by directing it primarily at civilians and by making it too safe for the combatants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
In the popular imagination, cave men and dinosaurs shared the earth. Not so. Dinosaurs were wiped out in 60,000,000 BC and but humans did not show up for another 59 million years in 6,000,000 BC.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Is Twitter the primordial ooze from which a planetary consciousness will evolve?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
It is amusing that Kansas is known both for harbouring creationists who object to teaching evolution in schools and for having an economy based on agriculture that would immediately collapse if evolutionary biologists could not stay one jump ahead of insects evolving immunity to measures to control them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
It is astounding that there is even any debate over evolution vs. intelligent design. On one side you have all the world’s scientists who have millions of facts about chemistry, molecular biology and biology to bolster their argument. On the other you have the scientifically illiterate whose only argument is that one particular allegedly magically blessed desert tribe living 3000 years ago surely would have guessed correctly about how the world worked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
It is not so much survival of the fittest as survival of those who adapt most quickly to change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
It makes me very happy to contemplate that all the other species on earth that I love so much are my cousins, that I belong here on earth with them just as the whales, the salmon or the eagles. Oddly, this same thought fills the creationist with fear, horror and shame.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Man is the only animal who abandons his mate if she or he is unfaithful. Other animals sometimes try to maintain exclusive access to their mate, but they take their aggression out on rivals, never on their mate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Man is the only animal who goes off to sulk when his sexual advance is rebuffed. Every other animal gets back in the game immediately.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Man is the prisoner of evolutionary strategies that worked brilliantly when he was a hunter gatherer. But in a highly technological global village, they are suicidal. They lead us to strip the environment bare, focus on only the present moment, make war on our rivals and procreate like locusts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Man will have one of the shortest reigns on earth of any species. Usually a species goes extinct through competition, predation or inability adapt to changing climate. In contrast, man is busily doing himself in. He has too much power to change the planet and not enough wisdom to know what is safe to change. Man is like a 4-year old child with a chainsaw.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Man’s technological evolution proceeds much faster than his social evolution. This is leading to his early extinction. How fortunate for our generation to get to observe the spectacle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Most animals don’t seem to get much pleasure from sex, compared with what humans do. Apparently nature has to offer a massive bribe to persuade humans have have children and tend them for two decades.…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Natural selection long ago lead humans to eat whenever they see food. This suggests, until we learn to fine tune the brain chemicals that control appetite, the only diet plan likely to succeed is one that keeps excess food out of mind. Just as AA provides socialising without alcohol, fat people need socialising without food. Thanksgiving and Christmas socialising with other dieters would save 8 kg (17.64 lbs) a year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Nature hates change. Evolution adapting to even tiny changes change works only very slowly over tens of thousands of years. Unlike man, plants and animals have no artificial means to insulate them tiny changes in the environment, for example a minute increase in temperature allowed pine beetles to wipe out massive forests that had thrived for thousands of years.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Nesting sea birds spend a considerable percentage of their energy squabbling with each other over territory. Humans invented private property and the laws protecting it to reduce the amount of time and energy we need to protect our territories. It is a sort of global cease fire.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Not having enough to eat is the normal situation for any animal. Having enough is a rare, temporary situation to be exploited with gorging. Most humans in North America have created an environment of continuous abundance. Evolution has not yet equipped them for this novelty, but evolution is diligently winnowing the unfit with sexual exclusion and early death by cardiac disease, diabetes…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
One of the key features of humans is they can easily be hypnotised to believe things that are patently untrue. I suspect the original survival advantage of this trait was group consensus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Otherwise gentle people will drop large rocks from bridges onto passing ships or from overpasses onto cars, or drop bombs from airplanes onto schools. I suspect the ancient hard-wired morality is: if they are small and distant kill them, if large and close, treat them as kin.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Paleontologists have discovered many mass exinctions, even before the last ice age. They have discovered the cause. They all happened shortly after man invaded the territory. So much for the myth primitive man was a conservationist.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Plants get their energy from the sun. Herbivores get their energy by stealing the reserves of plants. Carnivores get their energy by killing then stealing reserves from the herbivores. Bees, fruit bats and hummingbirds are among the few animals that get their food legitimately, by working for it by pollinating the plants or disbursing their seeds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Predators, disease and hunger provide birth control services for species that refuse to provide their own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Since 1859, dishonest Christians have drummed the lie that the evolution is purely a matter of chance. Even many atheists have swallowed it. Granted, random mutation provides the contestants in the game of life, but natural selection decides who goes on to the next round. The judgement by natural selection is anything but random. It is an exhaustive life-long test of all-round fitness. If Christians were sincere, they should be equally astounded that the winner at Wimbledon each year is such a remarkably good tennis player since the process starts off with a set of players of randomly varied ability.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
So many of man’s misery comes from the fact we have changed our environment far too rapidly for us to adapt to it. Consider:
Then Now Pick fruits and vegetables and eat them immediately. Eat irradiated, frozen and processed fruits and vegetables that sat in storage 6 months and came from the other side of the earth. Sleep when the sun is down. Sleep according to work schedules. Active Sedentary High calorie fats and sugars hard to come by. High calorie foods in abundance. Salt hard to come by. Salt in abundance. Live in small bands. Live in giant cities. One person does all the tasks to stay alive. Specialisation. Dealing with predators. Dealing with advertisers and other con men.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
So many of our what we consider human vices, e.g. gluttony, lust and sloth are actually successful survival strategies honed over millennia of evolution for living as hunter gatherers in small groups.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Teaching creationism along side evolution would be as fey as giving equal time to the conceit that fairies are responsible for soil fertility.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The assumption that the only life in the entire universe is here on earth is so monumentally absurd, so preposterously self-centered that only a Christian could have suggested it with a straight face. We know that the laws of chemistry and physics here are earth are the same throughout the universe. Why not the biology? This Christian notion man’s universally unique and special status is not only ludicrous, it is odious. It is conceit taken to the nth power.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The closest parallel we have to today’s global warming was 50 million years ago. It was a much more gradual rise by . It resulted in mass extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The creatures that have avoided extinction longest are those like the crocodilians that learned to conserve energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The easiest way to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer is to increase the number of deaths due to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So take care interpreting statistics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The good news about global warming is the ancestors of plants and animals alive today squeaked through severe global warming events of the past without going totally extinct. Global warming will knock technological man on his ass, possibly even drive him to extinction. The planet will recover in a million years or so, evolving new bio-diversity and rich, balanced ecosystems. The bad news is global warming is just one of extreme stresses technological man has put on the other species and the ecosystems that sustain all life. Most of the of the species we all love will soon be gone forever. I consider that a crime even more serious that genocide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The last things artificial life forms made of metal want covering their planet are water and oxygen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The male moose proudly displays an ever larger rack of antlers with each passing year. It proves his genetic fitness and sexual desirability. The male human hides his signs of seniority with hair dye and a toupée. This is because younger males are more desirable because they have more years in them to help raise the offspring.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The natural course of things is for weapons to evolve to ever greater efficiency. It is only a matter of time until they evolve to any imagined degree of lethality. If a technological civilisation is not to do itself in with its own cleverness, it must firmly resolve to stop and reverse the evolution of weapons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
The universe works to reward (with preferential survival) those creatures who sacrifice the good of all for personal gain. This bleak fact should, once and for all, nail the coffin lid shut on the nutty idea the universe was designed by a benign god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
There are many things in science that boggle the layman’s mind: the immense size of the universe, the fact the universe has a finite size, that you eventually get back to where you started if you head off in a straight line, that space itself expands, quantum mechanics, that time is not universal, that the Grand Canyon was dug by a river, that satellites don’t fall down, the big bang, evolution… That does not make them any less true. There is no law that says the universe has to be simple enough for even a willfully ignorant Southern Baptist high school dropout to understand.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Though rivers grind round the rocks, and cave springs create fantastic crystals, there is no reason to believe they do it with intelligent intent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Through most of earth’s history evolution proceeded with glacial slowness punctuated by periods of excitement called extinction events. We humans are living in the middle of one of the biggest and rapid exinction events ever — one that we are causing. It is like having a first row Colosseum seat to watch ancient Rome destroy itself from excess.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
We are in the middle of a global extinction event, the biggest since the end of the dinosaurs, but this one we humans caused. But cheer up; in past, it took the earth only 10,000,000 years to recover.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
We humans evolved over nearly all our history in groups of 1000 or less. Today, because of the Internet and mass communications we are aware of the suffering of all seven billion people on the planet, and hundreds of other species as well. We now know about coming catastrophes such as the global warming, the energy crunch, mass extinctions, running out of water, overpopulation, accidental nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, galactic debris crashing into earth… However, we have not evolved a way to recalibrate our sensitivity. No wonder pharmaceutical companies are doing a roaring business in anti-depressants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
We humans have all kinds of trouble because we did most of our evolving long before there was technology or even agriculture. For example:~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
- We crave high calorie foods, a great strategy in a world where calories are hard to find.
- We are constantly on guard, a great strategy in a world where predators attack you daily and strangers will usually try to kill you.
- We have more than two children, a great strategy in a world where most children die of infectious diseases or starvation.
- We create the most lethal weapons our imaginations can concoct, a great strategy in a world where all other animals have teeth and fangs and we do not.
- We try to be as sedentary as possible, again a great strategy in world where calories are scarce and you have to work hard to dig/find/hunt your own food.
- We have no fear of speed, a great strategy in a world where the fastest you could go was the fastest you could run.
We humans have evolved for feast and famine. Whenever food is available we eat as much as possible. This suggests the way to successful weight control is simply to make food unavailable periodically.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
We wonder why there are not more signs of technological life in space. The most obvious answer comes from looking at life here on earth. There are at least a dozen ways we are likely to wipe ourselves out before we reach the stars. We will be here on earth for just an eye-blink of evolutionary time. Technology evolved too quickly. We are still using the mindset of the hunter-gatherer band to deal with our fellows.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
What are the words every woman longs to hear? “Would you mind if I did the windows today?”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
What changes in the modern world affecting sexual selection are different from the conditions under which we evolved?I think this means handsome male promiscuous charmers, and wealthy older men will rise in perceived attractiveness. Women who like children will become more desirable than women who like sex.
- Women can now raise children without male help given government aid.
- Men who are wealthy can now help raise children even when they are absent or dead.
- Working women now have less time to care for their children. To properly care for their children, they need money to pay others to supervise their children.
- Birth control now means mainly people who want children have them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
When the environment changes suddenly, it upsets the species balance. A newcomer species can then take over in a population explosion because it has elsewhere previously adapted to the new local conditions giving it a competitive advantage over the native species. For example, global warming has allowed a virulent tropical fungus Cryptospordium Gattii to overwhelm the native fungi species on eastern Vancouver Island. One microbiologist said she was as astounded to see it so far north as she would at Godzilla making an appearance.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
When you encounter an individual who makes your teeth sweat, makes you shiver and bite your hand in lust, you have just unconsciously computed that your genes merged with theirs would create an individual with optimal survival and reproductive success. Your genes are screaming “Go for it!”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Why do the elderly take so much pleasure is poking fun at the strong sexual desires of the young? Have they forgotten what it was like to be so horny your hands shook and it felt like your teeth were sweating? Perhaps it is just envy. We old timers need to be reminded that this hormonal surge has been time tested through millions of years of natural selection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Why is man so susceptible to believing nonsense, or pretending to believe nonsense, just because his peers do? Man is a social animal. In times past, if he expressed deviant views he would be outcast from his group. That meant death. Man thus evolved the ability to suppress common sense in favour of group consensus. The key then to dispelling religious superstition is just to let everyone know there is a sizeable number of people to think it is bunk.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Wolves hunt the weakest and sickest individuals in a herd. Humans hunt the strongest and fittest. Wolves act like animal breeders to improve the stock. Humans…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
Young chimps are brighter than young humans. Why then did humans develop technology and not chimps? Humans actively teach their young. Their young unquestioningly accept whatever they are told. Young chimps must learn solely by observing the adults.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 62)
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes, a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
~ Carl Sagan (born: 1934-11-09 died: 1996-12-20 at age: 62)
The extinction of an animal is an insult to God.
~ Jewish saying
Aging and death may be the species’ way of eliminating those who are no longer genetically useful but still competing for limited resources with those whose job it now is to pass along the genes.
~ Michael Shermer (born: 1954-09-08 age: 55) Why People Believe Weird Things
It is not true that the human eye is irreducibly complex such that the removal of any part results is blindness… [implying it could not have evolved.] The human eye is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years to a simple eyespot where a handful of light sensitive cells provide information to the organism about an important source of light — the sun; to a recessed eyespot where a small surface indentation filled with light sensitive cells provides additional data in the form of direction; to a deep recession eyespot where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment, to a pinhole lens eye that is actually able to focus the image; to a complex eye found in such modern mammals as humans.
~ Michael Shermer (born: 1954-09-08 age: 55) Why People Believe Weird Things page xxi
The “Intelligent Design” suffers from a serious flaw: the world is simply not always so intelligently designed! … The configuration of the retina is in three layers, with the light-sensitive rods and cones at the bottom, facing away from the light, and underneath a layer of bipolar, horizontal, and amacrine cells, themselves underneath a layer of ganglion cells that help carry the signal from the eye to the brain. And this entire structure sits beneath a layer of blood vessels. For optimum vision, why would an intelligent designer built an eye backwards and upside down? Because an intelligent designer did not build the eye.
~ Michael Shermer (born: 1954-09-08 age: 55) Why People Believe Weird Things page xxi
These scientists [evolutionary biologists] are not arguing about whether evolution happened; they are debating the rate and mechanism of evolutionary change.
~ Michael Shermer (born: 1954-09-08 age: 55) Why People Believe Weird Things page 141
What separates science from all other human activities… is its commitment to the tentative nature of all its conclusions.
~ Michael Shermer (born: 1954-09-08 age: 55) Why People Believe Weird Things page 124.
Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.
~ George Gaylord Simpson (born: 1902-06-16 died: 1984-10-06 at age: 82)
The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept… Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine.
~ Victor Stenger (born: 1935-01-29 age: 75)
Most of the places in the universe will kill life instantly.
~ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (born: 1958-10-05 age: 51) Stupid Design on the notion the universe was intelligently designed for the benefit of humans.
No engineer would design an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewer system.
~ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (born: 1958-10-05 age: 51) Stupid Design on the notion the human reproductive organs are a result of intelligent design.
Science’s capacity, without equal, is to remove, as far as possible, our own urges to delude ourselves.
~ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (born: 1958-10-05 age: 51)
The major advances in civilisation all but wreck the civilisations in which they occur.
~ Alfred North Whitehead (born: 1861-02-15 died: 1947-12-30 at age: 86)
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us… Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
~ Edward Osborne Wilson (born: 1929-06-10 age: 80)
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