©2008-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind ProductsFor 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 (born: 1995 age: 16) 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: 41)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? The dimwit is under the delusion that evolutionary theory predicts that evolutionary predicts you should find intermediate chimeras between any two extant creatures. Clearly he has not read even one book on the subject he makes a living debunking. Perhaps, as a child actor, he early became confused between being a doctor and playing one on TV.
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)
Fossilisation requires extremely rare conditions. That is why many species leave no record at all.
~ Dr. Rodolfo Coria (born: 1959 age: 52)
In religion faith is a virtue; in science it’s a vice.
~ Jerry A. Coyne (born: 1949 age: 62)
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)
No fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.
~ 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: 70), The God Delusion page 125
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips… continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70), The Greatest Show on EarthThis means that people who do study the evidence, and pretend to reject it are bald faced liars with a crooked, disreputable agenda.
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: 70) 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: 70)
The overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour [the nerve from the brain to the larynx that detours via the heart]; a decent designer would never have perpetuated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 70)
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: 70)
There are clues from the distribution of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) 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: 70)
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: 70) Lament for Douglas 2001-05-14
Natural selection is engineering; sexual selection is art.
~ What Females Want and Males Will Do PBS (Public Broadcasting System) Nature Documentary
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80) .
The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80)
What we call Progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80)
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: 82), 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 (born: 1888-01-27 age: 124) Invaders episode of the Strange Days on Planet Earth documentary series
Mutation is utterly random, but selection is extremely choosy!
~ Ursula Goodenough (born: 1943-03-16 age: 68), Mind and Life conference 2002
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: 55) 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: 2002-05-20 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: 2002-05-20 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: 2002-05-20 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: 2002-05-20 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: 2002-05-20 at age: 60) , Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
~ Stephen Hawking (born: 1942-01-08 age: 70)
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
~ Stephen Hawking (born: 1942-01-08 age: 70)
The life we have on Earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to exist spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.
~ Stephen Hawking (born: 1942-01-08 age: 70)
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.
~ Stephen Hawking (born: 1942-01-08 age: 70)
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
Plants, in a state of nature, are always warring with one another, contending for the monopoly of the soil, — the stronger ejecting the weaker, — the more vigorous overgrowing and killing the more delicate. Every modification of climate, every disturbance of the soil, every interference with the existing vegetation of an area, favours some species at the expense of others.
~ Joseph Dalton Hooker (born: 1817-06-30 died: 1911-12-10 at age: 94) Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens.
I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not led him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)
Responding to the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce’s question whether he traced his descent from an ape on his mother’s or his father’s side: If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion — I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley (born: 1825-05-04 died: 1895-06-29 at age: 70)
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: 63), 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: 57)
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, adult-like ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether.
~ Steven Pinker (born: 1954-09-18 age: 57)
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 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: 57) 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: 57)
A creationist is someone who yearns to live 2000 years ago using 4000 year old science. The simplest way for them to get their wish would be to move to one of the poorest third world countries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
According to Darwin, people are competing in a life and death struggle for limited resources. Perhaps that is why even kindly people enjoy watching others experience death, pain and unpleasant experiences in the movies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Steven Hawking, he has proved you don’t need god to create the universe, just gravity. This is not the same as proving their is no god, just that he is unnecessary.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Animals cannot increase their population unless it has recently been decimated. There is limited territory and food. Humans try to increase their numbers indefinitely anyway exploiting temporary food sources.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Anyone without any scientific education could still notice the way rivers lay down a new layer of sediment each year, or a volcano lays down a new layer of lava each time it erupts, or a glacier a new layer of ice each year. Now count the layers. There are way, way too many to have been laid down in 6014 years , as Bishop James Ussher claimed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Christian fundamentalists claim that an intelligent designer created each species individually. Why then did he put tiny useless leg and finger bones in whales? No designer would include random junk. Ditto human appendixes, non-working eyes in cave fish and adipose fins on salmon. The designer came up with a much better way of circulating blood through the lungs for the alligator. Why would he put inferior designs in all other creatures? If there were a designer, he was incompetent, hardly intelligent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christianity explains absolutely nothing about the images coming in from the Hubble telescope. Science has intricate equations that explain an amazing amount of what you see. Christianity is a primitive attempt at science that was never updated.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians claim “Our deity, Jehovah, designed the universe expressly for homo sapiens”. That could not be so. If you were plopped down at random in the universe you would die instantly. There are only a few extremely rare places where you would have any chance of survival.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Christians originally opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution not because there was any flaw in its logic, but because they feared the moral implications of the biblical creation myth being debunked. In other words, their opposition was based purely on how they wanted things to be, not on any evidence for how they are.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians seem to have much less problem with the first 10 billion years of the universe’s evolution than they do with the last million, even though astounding things happened like the formation of stars, and the creation of gold out of hydrogen. Why is this? Vanity. They can’t stand the idea they are just another primate. They are only interested in science where it intersects with Christian dogma.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians sometimes reject Darwin on aesthetic grounds. I too find the consequences of evolution hideous. I am revolted by the cruelty of predators for their prey. I am disgusted by petty territoriality in so many species. I am ashamed of the mindless brutality of my own species. I can see how these traits were inevitable given natural selection. Darwin accurately describes things the way they are, not as I would wish them to be.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Creationism has a big problem. It does not work. If you try to use it to find oil, you won’t find any. If you try to use it to manage fisheries, your fish will go extinct. If you try to use it to launch communications satellites, they will fall down. If you want to build a computer, it gives no direction. Any country that starts replacing science with creationism, is like a first century technology country trying to compete in the modern world. It is voluntarily taking on more backward than third world status. It is resigning as a superpower.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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 infallibility 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: 64)
Creationism predicts that god’s beneficence would provide animals with the common sense not to defecate or urinate near their water holes. Evolutionary theory predicts they would not likely evolve that capability without intelligence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists argue like bratty, ignorant children — naïve, rude, mocking, without substance and full of error. They are irritating primarily not because of their ignorance but because of their arrogance, to spit at august scientists who know hundreds of thousands of times more than they do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists assert that an intelligent deity designed the universe including man with divine perfection. What sort of designer would install teeth and vertebrae designed to wear out by 50 in a being specified to live until 80?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists cannot conceive of processes that take longer than 4000 years. In geology something so slow as a movement of less than a 1 mm (39,370.08 microinches) a year, over a hundred million years, can split a continent into two. Evolution too astounds with what can happen given enough time. All it takes is elementary school arithmetic to see how that is so. The creationists lie to themselves. They can see, year by year, rivers laying down a layer of silt. They can count the layers, but they refuse to acknowledge what they see.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Creationists claim there is no evidence of intermediate forms when a new species splits off an old one. Yet there is an absolutely complete record for the evolution of one species of dialog into another. The diatom has the advantage of fossilising massively. Diatom fossils are so numerous that they are used for filtering swimming pool water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists debunk evolution by expressing their disbelief life could have originated naturally. Since they have never studied the theory of evolution, they don’t seem to understand it does not even attempt to explain the origin of life. It is about how life changes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists have been crying, “But where are the intermediate species?” They have been busy ignoring the mother of all intermediate species for 151 years. The first remains of Archaeopteryx were discovered in 1861; just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx is half way between a reptile and a bird. They further ignore the logical problem, that when you find a “missing link” as creationists call them, you create two new gaps to be filled, giving the creationists even more ammunition in their eyes. If you have ever buried a pet, you know that usually the remains disappear in a decade or two without leaving a trace. It takes rare fluke conditions to preserve a corpse for hundreds of millions of years. We are lucky to have as complete a fossil record as we do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists love to point out that Piltdown man was a hoax. What they fail to point out it was a famous priest, Teilhard de Chardin who perpetrated it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Creationists tell me a 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 a 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: 64)
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: 64)
Creationists want to participate as scientists and enjoy the prestige of science, but they refuse to abide by science’s rules of evidence. That is like Creationists writing books on chess where they refuse to acknowledge that bishops can only move on the diagonal. If you don’t follow the rules, it isn’t science; it isn’t chess.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Creationists who reject evolution on the grounds it is “just a theory” must similarly reject Newton’s theory of gravity for the same reason.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
cringe: verb, what one does on viewing science fiction written by Christians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Darwinian evolution has arranged things that animals sacrifice themselves for the next generation. This is usually also true of humans. However, corporate propaganda has convinced millions of people to sacrifice their grandchildren by leaving them no oil, oceans without fish and a world made uninhabitable by greenhouse gases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Darwin’s theory of evolution explains choking, hiccups, bad backs, hernias, the blind spot, the backwards retina, and why you need to remove wisdom teeth. Creation science says these things can’t happen because a perfect god designed humans independently of all other species.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Depression is common in humans, especially in winter. I speculate that depression is an adaptation. When we lived in caves, starvation was a major problem each winter. You could pretty well count on some of the people in the group dying each winter. If the people who most likely to die self-identified, became depressed, and stopped eating and otherwise stopped consuming communal resources, that would leave more to support the rest of the group. Depression is outmoded in western society. Getting depressed won’t help your fellows in the least.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Did you ever watch a lion attack a herd of wildebeest? The herd watches passively as the lion takes one of the wildebeest down. Surely if they ganged up, the lion would not have a chance, but they don’t. Why? Because it is to their advantage if the herd is thinned. There is more grass and space to go round. Humans behave the same way acting unconsciously for the same reason. They want their neighbours to die. That is why they vote against welfare and universal medical care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Dinosaurs had lungs 33% more efficient than ours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Early in man’s history, we had very little understanding of how the universe worked. Pretty much all we had was tradition. We knew that doing what we had been doing for generations would work reasonably well. It was safer to stick with it than try something new. We enforced this strategy with peer pressure. People believed what everyone else, including our ancestors, believed, no matter how bizarre. This was a safer strategy than having people try to think things through for themselves. Unfortunately, this survival strategy makes it very easy for the media to manipulate modern humans. It also ensured the survival of cruel and irrational beliefs enshrined in religions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Every single species of great apes is endangered. That is one heck a rotten way to treat your closest relatives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Evolution has had a staggering amount of time to produce its wonders. If you descended in an elevator 0.85 km (0.53 mile) 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: 64)
Evolution has left man a bit like a robot, equipped with a 745.70 kilowatts (1,000 horsepower) motor, no brakes and only a rudimentary safety interlock.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Evolution has left us with people who focus on the immediate danger. We have eliminated most immediate dangers from our environment, so this keenness is not nearly as crucial as it once was. Unfortunately, we have as a side effect evolved to ignore the long term dangers such as nuclear war, climate change and the end of oil which now threaten to extinguish us entirely.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Evolution is a cruel game that entraps all life, forcing it to play or have their genes discarded. Even intelligent species will breed to the maximum, destroying all that sustains them, if possible, in a mad dash to be the one to provide a bigger slice genetic base for the next generation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Evolution is a theory in the same sense that germ theory is. Germs are also observable facts. Evolution is also an observable fact. Rejecting the science of evolution for religious reasons is just as idiotic as rejecting the science of germs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Evolution is about how the tree of life grew in diversity on earth. It not about geology or cosmology or the origin of the universe or even the origin of life. Its creationist critics usually don’t understand that. They lump it together with the science of the big bang theory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Evolution is like a marathon. It is sometimes characterised as a game of survival of the fittest. However, the contestants have no concern for ensuring the healthiest or most intelligent prevail. They are out to ensure their own genes prevail, wretched as they may be. They are willing to win by hook or by crook. The mother of a psychopathic serial killer soldier or a severely deformed child favours her son over any Nobel prize winner. When there are not enough resources to go around (the norm) it is to one’s advantage to see the competition killed off, crippled or at least denied the resources to live. This explains why herd animals almost never go to the defence of each other during a predator attack. It explains why humans treat the homeless so cruelly. Fitness is defined as the creatures that win this no-rules war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Evolution works because animals compete for territory, food, mates, status, offspring… Then along comes a being like me who says “Screw it! I don’t want to play. It is a stupid game.” I voluntarily take myself out of the game, out of the gene pool. I am the ultimate in unfitness. Oddly, nothing too terrible happens to me personally as a consequence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Evolution works extremely slowly. You have to expect serious trouble if you radically change an animal’s environment. For humans, we have cut walking from per 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: 64)
Evolution works toward the optimum, not too much, not too little. Man works on a different principle, “more is better”. He pursues this goal even when it destroys his environment, ruins his health, bankrupts him or condemns his offspring to extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Flowers invented advertising and payment for services rendered. Blossoms convince insects and hummingbirds to spread pollen. Fruits convince animals to spread seeds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
For millennia, we would sit around a fire at night and tell stories to each other and bask in the warmth. I suspect this behaviour by now is hard wired in our DNA. Even today we sit around campfires or sit in front of a fireplace or pot-bellied stove ignoring the high tech alternatives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From a plant’s point of view, a fruit is payment to an animal for spreading its seeds. It makes the fruit delicious to attract the animals, and nutritious to encourage the genes of animals that co-operate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Gerontology recapitulates pediatric development, only in reverse — wispy 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: 64)
Given that birds and modern day reptiles are close cousins of the dinosaurs, dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given that human DNA is so similar to other mammals, and given that humans lived pretty much as other animals did until 10,000 years ago, I suspect vanity has made humans exaggerate how much more intelligent they are than other species. Granted there are some clever humans, but the average one survives merely because he lives in a sustaining womb of civilisation that tells him what to do. He has not the sense on his own to even come in out of the rain. Further, we measure intelligence by human goals, e.g. construction and the manipulation of objects rather than the goals of other species such as composition or athletics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Human intuition fails when we try to study processes that take place over vast amounts of time, such as astronomy, geology and evolution. Time lapse photography now lets us study things like glaciers, plant growth, decay and tides, thereby extending our intuition. Imagine if we had a super time lapse photography that let us watch the birth of stars, or the wobbling of the north pole, the carving of rivers or the evolutionary flowering of life on earth, brutally pruned back to the ground again and again by mass extinction events.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Human mothers are much more likely to abandon their infants or kill them than other apes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Humans are like ants exploring a 1 metre (39.37 in) region around their nest and from that pontificating on the nature of life in the universe. They assume of course that the tree they discover is probably the only tree in the universe, since it is the only one they have studied.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans are quite strange animals. What other animal cuts or plucks its hair to create artistic patterns? What other animal paints its face? What other animal persuades others of its species to cut it open and rearrange the muscles to give the illusion of youth? What other animal covers itself in woven plant fibres? What other animal eats so much and moves so little it dies an early death? What other animal hoards things it has no use for, just to deny them to others?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans are the only animal that does not have a sustainable recycling policy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Humans have created tools to predict 100 years into the future, and even further for some things such as astronomy. Unfortunately, psychologically, we have almost no ability to react to that information. We are creatures of the here and now. The species that replaces us may have no more ability to predict, just a propensity to act on the predictions, considering the well being of future generations as more important than the current one — the way most other animal species behave.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
I can imagine scientists on some planet arguing, “But how could earth possibly support life, much less intelligent life? It has almost no arsenic or germanium. Consider the temperature. Water is a liquid there for nameless one’ sake! It even falls from the sky!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
I have always found the assertion ludicrous that the only life in the universe is here on earth. Imagine you had another earth-like planet. How could you possibly keep it sterile with thousands of meteorites bombarding it each day?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have heard biologists argue that intelligent alien species that evolved off-earth probably would not have a face: two eyes, a nose and a mouth. They see that as an accident of evolution. I am not so convinced. Having the eyes on top gives greater range of vision. Two eyes are needed for 3D or to see to both sides. Having the mouth on the bottom puts it closer to the prey, especially for animals whose ancestors routed in the mud. I could see a single nostril instead of two, but two small ones probably helps keep out insects and debris. Humans have a fatal design flaw, taking air down the same tube as food. I would not be surprised if aliens were free of that defect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I have often despaired that humans refuse to take measures to ensure their future such as reduce greenhouse gases, get rid of nuclear weapons, develop alternative energy, reduce population, prepare for earthquakes, volcanoes and floods… It is as if we should be called homo procrastinatus. I suspect evolution has made us this way. During most of our species time on earth man had little ability to predict the future. There was so much that had to be done to deal with immediate threats, that it was counter productive to fret about future ones.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
I often wish our species would go extinct quickly before they do any more damage. We humans are the biggest disaster to hit earth since the KT asteroid. Our best hope is artificial intelligence, which just might make us come to our senses in time or which could also terminate the human experiment abruptly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I saw an Australian guy do a creationist lecture debunking evolution as part of the documentary Friend of God. Every single thing he has was untrue, or a straw man argument. For example, he falsely claimed that evolutions say that one’s literal grandparents were monkeys. He showed a slide of hairy faced grandparents to illustrate how this assertion was ludicrous. He falsely claimed evolutionists believed that dinosaurs and man roamed the earth at the same time. He showed a slide of a dinosaur pulling cart to debunk this assertion. He clearly had no legitimate arguments at all for creationism or against evolution. In other words, he knew he was lying. He knew he was pulling a con. But why? Hint: churches rake in over $71 billion each year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I speculate that religion evolved to encourage people to maintain traditions. For most of man’s existence, collective knowledge grew very slowly. Nearly always it was wiser to follow the established tradition than set out on a new untested path. Religion provided all manner of bogus fears to encourage sticking with the tried and true. The problem, of course, is much of that traditional knowledge was simply wrong. Today, knowledge is evolving so quickly, and our world is changing so quickly, it is almost suicidal to stick with traditional knowledge. Religion has become toxic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think the distinction between natural and artificial selection is not nearly as sharp as most people imagine. For example, bees, in their selective pollinating attention to various plants, impose their notion of fitness on them. That is analogous to the artificial selection done by plant breeders. The distinction is more, does the selection come from some other species or from the general environment?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I wonder what possible mechanisms are possible in evolution to create large-brained intelligent creatures.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- 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 a 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: 64)
If civilisation collapses, your best bet for survival is to have a son in a criminal gang.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If even cuttlefish and octopodes (relatives of the clam) and cetacea can develop intelligence, I see no reason why intelligent creatures in other parts of our galaxy need look anything like humans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If God were like a gardener, who designed a garden and created it. Why would he then hide and refuse to tend it and leave it to vandals to destroy?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
If humans were intelligently designed, surely testicles would have some sort of armour plating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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 105 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: 64)
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: 64)
Imagine a group of frogs philosophising that their pond contains all the life in the universe. It is absurd for the frogs to do that without first examining a very large number of other ponds. Humans would never have even considered such questions had it not been for religions stroking their egos with notions of grandiose importance. Flattery is an integral part of conning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine being a 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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
In species where the males fight to decide which males get to breed, the males are strong and tough. In species where the females judge displays to decide which males get to breed, the males are brightly coloured and good dancers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
In the game of evolution, it is not enough that you win, others must lose, because there are limited resources for the next generation. Cruelty of competition is at the very core of life. I find this fact a life a convincing argument that life could not have been designed by a benign god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Intelligent life in some other galaxies would have a 4 billion year head start on us. Think of how technology has changed earth in the last 400 years. You can’t begin to imagine what could happen with 10 million times more opportunity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Is Twitter the primordial ooze from which a planetary consciousness will evolve?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is a revolting thought, but perhaps racial prejudice is an unconscious urge to preserve genetic diversity. Perhaps humans are attempting unconsciously to split themselves into several species to speed up evolutionary adaptation. Whatever it is, it seems to be unconscious rather than rational.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
It is not just creationists who threaten science education. In one science documentary the narrator intoned that all animals need to seek mates while the video showed a group of all-female honeybees watching a nectar dance — nothing at all to do with reproduction. A documentary on relativity offered a completely backward explanation of howGPS works, claiming the hand held units broadcast messages to satellites. Another used kangaroos as examples of typical mammals. That is technically correct, but kangaroos are usually thought of as special kind of mammals, marsupials.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
It is unfortunate that the terms natural selection and domestication came into use. Lay people erroneously think they are completely different mechanisms. Domestication is just a special kind of natural selection where the pressure comes from one particularly oppressive species.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
It would be a bit eccentric to presume the laws of chemistry and physics are completely different on other planets otherwise identical to earth, without some evidence. Since the laws of biology derive from chemistry and physics this is what Christians do when they claim only earth, the center of the universe, harbours life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Just how big is the universe? It big enough that pretty well any logically consistent creature you could imagine must exist on at least 1000 planets?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Lay people, especially creationists, have a strong intuitive idea of what sort of structure to expect to occur naturally. They don’t realise they are projecting and extrapolating local intuition to realms where it does not apply. For example, every child is baffled to learn the earth is spherical. Why don’t we fall off? Our intuition fails when we take it outside our human-sized world. For example, at the quantum level everything is paradoxical. On the geological level our intuition cannot grasp processes that take millions of years. At the evolutionary level we cannot grasp processes that take billions of years of tiny incremental actions. At a cosmological level even atoms disappear. So they grasp blindly for something simple to let them hold onto their familiar expectations. Then they make up idiotic stories about bearded men hiding in the clouds, and somehow find them more plausible than the scientific explanations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Life as we know it could only have evolved on a planet exactly like earth. However, life as we don’t know it could evolve on a planet quite different from earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Life can be looked on as a 3D game where the goal is to maximise the total amount of carbon stored inside the collective bodies of one’s species. Right now, humans, rats, krill and ants are winning. Whales, elephants, lions and frogs are losing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Life is not as nearly as magical as we imagine. Craig Ventnor synthesised the DNA for a bacterium with a genetic sequencer, then inserted it into a cell without DNA . It was able to reproduce and produce new bacteria cells.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Mammals drive their young away once they become teenagers. Humans presume it is the children rejecting the parents, but the rejection works both ways.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Man’s environment has charged drastically. He was used to living in bands with no more than 170 others. Now he is expected to cope with 7 billion. During such times of rapid change you can expect those who cannot cope with the changes not to reproduce. I notice myself avoiding interacting with more than about 20 people to partially sidestep the problem.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Marine animals all need salt water for survival. Land animals all need fresh water for survival. A Christian would say “How kind of my god to have provided each what it required.” Darwin would say, “Animals had no choice. They either had to adapt to thrive with the water type available or perish.” Scientist say the saltiness of the ocean has nothing to do with divine beneficence. It is simply that evaporation leaves behind the salt, raining fresh water on the land. The salt leached from the soils and transported by the river gradually builds up in the oceans. Creationism was bleeding edge science — 4000 years ago. Modern day Christians are overly attached to antique science because of its ancient holy books covered everything of interest in the day, including science, which in now embarrassingly obsolete.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Mathematicians, physicists and chemists consider the notion that mathematics, physics and chemistry work differently elsewhere in the universe, an absurd notion, one that would need strong evidence to even consider. Yet, because of religious brainwashing, many biologists presume life on earth is unique until proven otherwise, even though biology could be a considered a special branch of chemistry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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 to have children and tend them for two decades.…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most animals, especially primates, bicker. They have frequent fights or attacks that last a few seconds. We humans have used technology to magnify these petty squabbles into decade long wars involving millions of people and millions of deaths. We have even evolved weapons that, if ever used, will drive our species to extinction or near extinction. At the very least, we will be reduced to pre-technological levels. Our prized cleverness and natural malice is our own undoing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most of the time, “be fruitful and multiply“ is a sound strategy for survival. However, in today’s world, it is insane, selfish and suicidal. The earth cannot sustain anywhere near the number of humans already born. We must stop looking procreation (as opposed to sex) with such rose-coloured glasses. It is more deadly on a planetary scale than taking crack.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
My hope is life in the universe is like dandelions here one earth. No matter how hard we try to wipe it out, it will reseed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Natural selection has given man the value that no other species is of importance other than how it serves man. Now that value is killing us because we failed to see how simple biodiversity serves man.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
One of the darker things to contemplate about evolution is we are discovering more and more extinct species on the hominid tree. Did homo sapiens wipe out its cousins with the same ruthlessness that today it is exterminating the gorillas, chimps and bonobos? If so, it implies genocide, war and brutality are in our bones, hiding just below the surface in all of us. It is only a matter of time until our essential nature drives our own species extinct.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the few happy facts you stumble over in the study of evolution is that plants enjoy insects drinking their nectar and animals eating their fruits.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
One of the lessons evolution has burned into life is that you must not put all your eggs in one basket. We humans have decided to unlearn that lesson. With globalisation, we have so interlinked our fates that the majority idiots of our planet are taking us all down. Our other mistake is to give extravagant power and wealth to a few fallible individuals. Even in the colonial insects, no individual has that sort of power for harm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the most ghastly facts of life is that evolution favours those creatures who have the must surviving offspring. This leads all animals try to wildly out breed their fellows, even if it means destruction of the environment that sustains the entire species. It even means that evolution rewards those that brutally kill off the competition. No wonder the world is filled with so many obnoxious people!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the most impressive things about life is how it will take advantage of the tiniest opportunity, the most microscopic inhospitable living space, the tiniest bit of food, barely suitable conditions that are present only for hours. Life never gets discouraged.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the most unusual features of humans, (if you don’count Republicans as human) is they care for the sick and disabled. Dolphins do this, but I can’t think of any other animal that does.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the peculiar things about evolution is it creates a primary loyalty to one’s offspring, even if they are criminal, defective or deformed. Hitler’s mother, even knowing what her child would become, still would have promoted him over everyone else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the reasons people are so reluctant to embrace natural selection, is that it forces you to confront just how cruel life on earth is. The process drives whole populations to genocide, overpopulation, greed, betrayal, hypocrisy, hierarchy… There is no advantage to a predator to kill its prey humanely. People would prefer to ignore the evidence, and bask in the glow of a kindly god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Opening your eyes at random on the fruits of evolution can’t help but boggle the mind:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Somebody’s occupation is concocting stage vomit.
- A rack of Taiwanese day-glo slippers.
- Photograph of a women pretending to copulate with an octopus.
- The bombardier beetle.
- bottled tap water.
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: 64)
Our technology is doing us in. We evolved the ability to change the entire planet without the necessary patience to thoroughly test an innovation before globally applying it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Paleontologists have discovered many mass extinctions, 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: 64)
Pity the poor paleontologist who finally finds the missing link B between two species an and C. He has, as a side effect, created two new missing links, between an and B and B and C. The creationists now have even more clubs to thump him with.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Plants emit odours, not for the delectation of humans, but to attract insects for pollination. We humans have thus come to appreciate subtle odours made of a complex mixture of aromatic organic chemicals. Why then do perfume chemists create overpowering scents made of just a few elements whose psychological effect is like an ice pick rammed into the nose?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Predators, disease and hunger provide birth control services for species that refuse to provide their own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Religious fundamentalists have absolutely no right to criticise evolutionary theory. They have carefully avoided learning anything about it their entire lives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Researchers have found that women are attracted to the body odour of males as different genetically from themselves as possible. With increased travel between parts of the world, we should see an accelerated mixing of genes and a gradual end to both races and racism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientist try to figure out how life originated on earth. I think this is wrong-headed. It is not as though earth sits in a vacuum bottle. Material from all over the solar system pummels it every day. It would make more sense to also study how life could have arrived on any of that material. Allowing for that possibility greatly expands the field of study to well outside the solar system to find the initial sparks of life. Bits of it could well have come about in widely separated parts of the universe under vastly different conditions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists are working to contain the electric ants that man accidentally introduced to New Caledonia. They are pushing out all other insects and killing off species after species of plant. Similarly scientists are trying to control the explosion of crayfish accidentally introduced to Cape Breton National park. Will we someday get a visit from the GBA (Galactic Biodiversity Agency) to thin the human herd?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists estimate the Kepler project will discover at least 50 planets very similar to earth. Bit by bit, the conceited notion that earth is unique in the universe is crumbling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists tell me the graceful moves, elaborate colours and patterns of the sea dragon are the result of millennia of sexual selection, but how could such a primitive creature evolve such an elaborate and refined aesthetic sense?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Since eyes have evolved independently at least 7 times on earth, scientists are fairly sure higher life on other planets will have eyes too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Six times in earth’s history it has been hit by meteorites so large they sterilised the earth and vaporised the oceans (both water and salt).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night worrying that there may be a big hole in evolutionary theory. I don’t mean that the Christians were right, but that evolutionists may have overlooked something big. Here’s the problem. Ever since I was a child I have loved looking at brightly coloured fish, frogs, salamanders and insects. As an adult, I am similarly fascinated by brightly coloured marine invertebrates and the bizarre world of fluorescent deep sea creatures. I ask evolutionists how does evolution works to create such beauty? I ask why are deep sea creatures so elaborately shaped? Why do deep sea creatures fluoresce? There seems to be no practical purpose for the riot of invention and artistic ingenuity. I would have expected such a mindless, non-planning process, (as evolution is advertised) totally obsessed with survival, to produce grim featureless creatures, the sort you might have expected to arise from the imagination of a Soviet bureaucrat.
The evolutionist give two answers:
- Sexual selection. The colours, patterns and elaborate shapes appeal to potential partners.
- The colours warn potential predators of defensive weapons. They warn off predators.
My main objection to sexual selection as the explanation is that species which do no sexual selection are often also brightly coloured. Consider the corals. My other objection is, the theory of sexual selection does no prediction. It is an after-the-fact rationalisation. It does not help me figure out why one species would embark on some particular bizarre competition in a body part and other species do not. Insects have gone madly off in all directions. Is there any pattern about which unique direction of sexual beauty each species heads off? The theory does not tell me under what conditions which body part will become sexualised. (Then again, maybe it does, and I have simply not been exposed to it in the popular press.)
The use of bright colours can work, even when the wearer has no defensive weapons. The bluff works even better if there is exists a similar-looking species that is poisonous or foul-tasting. With bright colours being so ubiquitous, I would think the bluff would no longer work. I would expect they would become a net disadvantage, making it easier for predators to detect the prey species.
Are there any other explanations? Why do you find the standard answers satisfying?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
The big problem with Creationism/Intelligent Design is that is simply not true. It is like a child’s explanation of why the earth has to be flat. (It originally included a flat earth as one of its tenets.) There is no evidence for Creationism. There is a ton of evidence against it. The competing theory, evolution explains things extremely well.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The closest parallel we have to today’s global warming was 50 million years ago. It was a much more gradual rise by 6°C (11°F). It resulted in mass extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The creatures that have avoided extinction longest are those like the crocodilians that learned to conserve energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
The fundamental vanity built into every animal to see its DNA predominate over the earth at the expense of all other life forms is what drives humans to overpopulate the earth past its breaking point.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
The good news that comes from the study of evolution, is that even when earth suffers a massive catastrophe that wipes out nearly all life on earth, given enough time, life comes back changed, able to handle the new conditions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Grand Canyon is 1.61 km (1 mile) deep. The sediments were laid down 6.10 metres (20 ft) every million years. Life had even more time to slowly evolve.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The last things artificial life forms made of metal want covering their planet are water and oxygen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
The older rural homes in Alabama have ice houses. The rivers froze over in winter. People would use saws to cut out blocks of ice from the rivers for year-round refrigeration. The rivers no longer freeze. How can these people deny the reality of global warming?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The purpose of evolution is survival, not rapid innovation or living comfortably.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The recurrent laryngeal nerve runs from the brain to the larynx. In mammals, it doesn’t take the direct route, but, even in giraffes, makes a long detour, via the heart. Evolution explanations why this is so. The Bible cannot not explain how a god could design such shoddy work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Spanish are rabidly driving sharks extinct by killing them for their fins used to make a gourmet soup that Chinese pay a bowl for. The fisherman remove the fins without killing the sharks first.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
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: 64)
There are three kinds of animal:I wonder what life would be like that evolved a fourth level of co-operation where groups of hives acted like a single entity.
- Single cell such as bacteria
- Multi-cell such as sponges and orangutans.
- Hive, such as ants and bees
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
There have been 17 species of hominids. All but one, homo sapiens (us), have already gone extinct. With odds like that, I think it rather optimistic to imagine we will prevail forever.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
There is a song in Oklahoma Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City about a hick who goes to Kansas city and is amazed by the technology. When humans finally make contact with an off-world intelligent species, we are going to be such gawking hicks, astounded that marvels could have existed all along without us suspecting them. Our certainty that we are the best there is in the universe, the very reason it was all created, based on nothing but pride without a single fact to back it up, will make us a laughing stock.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
There is little chance we humans will avoid driving ourselves to extinction in the next few centuries, but it is possible we can go without taking most of the other multi-celled creatures with us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Those who defend creationism professionally are fully aware it is a crock. They argue not because they think it is true, but because they are trying to preserve the church’s power to determine what people consider good behaviour, and to preserve the church’s power to scare/trick people into tithing them money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Though Darwin had formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection by 1837, because of his fear of Christians, he procrastinated publishing it until 22 years later in 1859 in The Origin of Species. Even as it was, they mercilessly personally attacked him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Though I find it ludicrous to assert that earth is the only place in the universe harbouring intelligent life, I don’t think intelligent aliens have yet visited earth. Why?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Somebody like Wikileaks would have released secret government documents by now. These are too juicy to hold on to.
- Aliens would know we are here by atmospheric changes from the industrial revolution and from radio and TV broadcasts. These would have reached a sphere only about 100 light years radius surrounding earth. Even if aliens noticed and immediately set off for earth at the speed of light (or sent a laser beam back) they would not get here for yet another 100 years. Our local Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across. Just to check for intelligent life anywhere in our galaxy we would have to wait at least 200,000 years.
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: 64)
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 extinction 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: 64)
Throughout history man keeps making the same error over and over, presuming that what is known is all there is and presuming that which is closest is unique in the universe. I think by now the default presumption should be there is still more to discover until proven otherwise, and the way things are here is likely the way they are elsewhere unless proven otherwise. There is likely nothing unique of consequence about us and our location.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
To scientists, terms like belief, hunch, hypothesis, theory… have very particular meaning. In casual speech, a theory is just an hunch or possibility. For something to be a theory in the context of science, there must be considerable experimental evidence support it and almost none to refute it. It must make predictions. Usually it requires some mathematical equations to explain what it has to say quantitatively, not just qualitatively. It must depend on general principles that predict specific results. In science, the word theory does not imply something doubtful as it often does in casual use. Theory is used more in the sense of music theory, a mathematically explanation.
Creationists try to argue that their bible-based beliefs are indeed theories. In the context of science, creationism and intelligent design come nowhere near making the grade as theories to sit along side Newton’s Theory of Gravity, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Creationists have no right to pontificate on what is and what is not a theory in the context of science, because they either don’ know or don’ respect the definitions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Using technology, we humans have managed to create massive problems that we are not capable of solving. It is as hopeless as expecting a pack of dogs to solve the problem of soil erosion. Humans are not up to the task:
- They don’t care about the big picture.
- Their prime focus is on competing with, defeating and hurting enemies.
- They are driven primarily by emotion.
- They tenaciously hold onto beliefs that have been proven wrong.
- They prefer I win-you lose solutions to win-win. This creates political logjams.
I can see three possible solutions:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The development of artificial intelligence that simple overwhelm humans and tricks them into doing the right thing.
- Some sort of technology to amplify intelligence, the ability to concentrate or the ability to look at problems from a planetary perspective. A think of these people might be able to overwhelm ordinary humans.
- A think tank of the brightest people funded by billionaires who see our planet is in peril. People are selected for their intelligence and global perspective. It is one thing to create a solution, but quite another to get idiotic FOX viewers to accept it.
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: 64)
We humans are genetically very similar to both chimps and bonobos. We are like chimps with our violence and competitiveness. We are like bonobos with our consideration and rampant sexuality. Bonobo society is unusually peaceful. Prudes are horrified to learn that in bonobo society, homosexuality, incest and pedophilia are all compulsory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
We humans are more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to a shark.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
We humans evolved under conditions of food deprivation. We evolved hunger to prod us to spend much of our time seeking out food. The catch is, we now live under conditions of superabundance. We interpret hunger as a signal we should eat, and thus quickly become obese. You mustn’t eat just because you are hungry! And you especially have to learn not to eat when you are not even hungry. You have to stop eating, even in the middle of a meal, when you are no longer hungry. It is as simple as that. To implement this, you need to perform an experiment. Refrain from eating for a week unless you are at least slightly hungry. Monitor your weight. If you don’t lose fat, you must turn it up a notch and refrain from eating unless you are at least moderately hungry. If that does not work, turn it up another notch and avoid eating unless you are at least very hungry. By experimenting, you will come to know the hunger tipping point at which you can maintain your ideal weight. You don’t have to count any calories or follow any special diet, other than common sense nutrition. Unfortunately, the ideal point is uncomfortable. Evolution made it that way to keep you from starving to death. One advantage of living at the ideal point, with a hunger edge, is food tastes much better.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
- 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: 64)
We imagine that our aesthetic sense is transcendent. Yet oddly even insects with tiny brains have almost the same preferences in flowers. In fact, the flowers evolved to please insect notions of beauty not ours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
We live in a hell where each species tries to fill every cubic meter of the universe with its own likeness and kill off all the competition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
We share 98.7% of our genes with chimps. We share 99.5% of our genes with fellow humans. Chimps and humans are so closely related that they can donate blood to each other. We have the same blood types.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
What are the words every woman longs to hear? “Would you mind if I did the windows today?”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
What changes in the modern world affecting sexual selection are different from the conditions under which we evolved?
- 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.
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.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
When humans brag they have the biggest brains on the planet (relative to body size), it is a bit like a baseball player bragging he holds the record for the most home runs hit during an eclipse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
When I was a toddler I absolutely hated being left in a totally dark room. I pleaded with my parents to leave bedroom door ajar or to leave a lamp on. They told me not to be silly. I was both terrified and furious they would not grant me this tiny concession which would not inconvenience them in the least. Eventually my Dad relented and got me a brown Bakelite night light. This fear was so primal. For a cave-dwelling child, if the fire went out, it probably meant those looking after it had been killed by predators or other bands of humans. Even it if went out from lack of fuel, this too was a major catastrophe. I ask you to consider a night light when you need to buy a baby shower gift. There is no need to put kids through this primal trauma. You can get them inexpensively at Canadian Tire, amazon.com or Cloud·b. Some project stars or soothing images on the ceiling. Battery-powered ones will need to recharged each day.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
When the Christian sees biological complexity, e.g. a snail shell, and announces that could not have happened by chance, it must have a designer, he is right. The catch is the designer is not an invisible bearded man in the clouds; it is natural selection, and it works blindly and incredibly slowly without planning, ruthlessly discarding nearly all of its imperfect work. It is quite bungling compared with a human designer, hardly a god.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
When we go looking for technological civilisations is space, the problem is they will mostly likely be at least 100,000 years more advanced than us. Most of the ones similar to our level will rapidly go extinct.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
When you despair about man destroying the planet and himself, consider these two things:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The earth will repair itself within about 10,000,000 years. This seems eternity to us, but it is an eyeblink in evolutionary time. Earth has recovered from similar catastrophes many times before and recovered life in completely new forms.
- Scientists estimate there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. It takes light 100,000 years to cross it. There are 125 billion such galaxies. We have visited none of them. From a cosmic perspective, lamenting the extinction of man is a bit like lamenting the loss of a population of paramecia in a drop of water. That surely is not all the life there is.
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: 64)
Whenever animals (including humans) have sufficient food, water and territory, they reproduce more until they are back into insufficiency. Evolution replaces any animal that refuses to participate in this insanity by those that will.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Where did humans come from? You can follow the steps:
- atoms
- molecules
- RNA
- DNA
- single celled animals
- multi-celled animals
- animals with backbones
- mammals
- humans
Creationists balk at what science has to say for steps 1 and 9 because the authors of their bible speculated on those steps. The step that took all the time, and presumably was the biggest deal for nature was 6. The step that happened fastest, and was the easiest for nature was 9. Because of monumental vanity, it is the one creationists erroneously consider to be the grandest chasm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Whether a species goes extinct is no longer primarily a matter of natural selection, but of artificial selection. Humans decide which species are worth keeping. The best traits for survival are cuddliness and a face similar to a human’s.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Why did humans come to dominate earth while chimpanzees are headed for extinction? Humans learned to co-operate while chimps remained stuck in individual competition. Like ants, humans have a group loyalty, and are murderous to other groups. As our technology advances, we will do ourselves in. We are unable to move to the next level of global co-operation, such as needed to handle problems like global warming, global pollution, global water supply and global habitat preservation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Why do apples require more pesticide that any other crop? Apple evolution has stopped. All commercial apple trees are grafts of just a handful of individual trees discovered in the 1800s. Apple trees are clones. Commercially, there are only five genetic configurations. The insects continue to evolve better and better ways to overcome those few trees’ defences. This is monoculture taken to the extreme.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Why do we die? I think I have a non-religious answer to that question. Dying is an altruistic behaviour the older generation of animals have evolved to avoid competing with the younger generation for food and territory. If the adults are not likely to have any more offspring, they might as well die and make room. The giant cuttlefish lives only 3 years. Many animals take this to extreme and die before next generation are even born, e.g. the salmon and the octopus. Some sacrifice their bodies as food for the next generation as do some spiders. People live longer than other primates, because elderly people provide wisdom that younger people cannot. Most animals don’t have a culture as complex as humans, and hence are not as dependent on the elderly. In humans, having a long-lived grandmother enhances your survival. At the very least, she acts as midwife.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Why would creatures that live in dark ocean depths or creatures that are colour-blind have such spectacularly colourful bodies?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
You could think of the conflict between science as religion as a conflict between modern and ancient science. Stupid people prefer the ancient notion of gods because they are easier to understand. They don’t require any math.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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: 64)
Zoologists pull their hair when lay people say smothering along the lines: “The pitcher plant evolved purple and brown colouration, and a rotting odour to reassemble rotting meat in order to attract insects.” The problem is language improperly implies conscious planning and cunning. To say that same thing accurately takes several extra sentences. We need new vocabulary to say this both accurately and concisely, suitable for lay use. Perhaps something like: “The pitcher plant evolved purple and brown colouration, and a rotting odour to reassemble rotting meat, driven by attracting insects.” where driven gets a precise evolutionary context definition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Zoologists wondered why some bird species, such as the Birds of Paradise, were polygamous. The males spend all their time looking beautiful and trying to impress the females. The prettiest, most athletic male impregnates a dozen females, but takes no role it caring for the offspring. Because New Guinea is a recently formed island, birds have reached it, but not many bird predators. There is plenty of food. It is a bird paradise. Life is so good that females don’t need the help of a male to raise the young. I speculate that greater ease of existence in the USA is driving the switch to polygamy in the zoological sense.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
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
Evolution and science in general is in opposition to any religion that believes its holy text explains the natural world. But something interesting about religion is that people tend to pick and choose. So most Hindus don’t interpret the Vedas as disallowing evolution — but the Krishna Consciousness people do. Most Christians don’t interpret the Bible as disallowing evolution — but biblical literalists do. Muslims don’t necessarily interpret the Koran as prohibiting acceptance of evolution — but some do. The Torah in the hands of the ultra Orthodox is incompatible with evolution, yet some Jews are leading evolutionary scientists. It’s inaccurate to make sweeping generalizations about “religion is X”.
~ Dr. Eugenie C. Scott (born: 1945-10-24 age: 66)
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: 57) 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: 57) Why People Believe Weird Things page xxiNot only is step-wise evolution of the eye possible, it happened half a dozen times independently.
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: 57) 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: 57) 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: 57) 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 J. Stenger (born: 1935-01-29 age: 77)
Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium.
~ Bumper Sticker
Most of the places in the universe will kill life instantly.
~ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (born: 1958-10-05 age: 53) 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: 53) 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: 53)
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)
The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God. [It] contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator.
~ Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (born: 1805-09-07 died: 1873-07-19 at age: 67)Since evolution is a demonstrable fact, if the Bishop is correct, then the “revealed relations of creation” must be false.
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: 82)
Intelligent Design isn’t a theory, it’s the absence of a theory.
~ Steve Zara
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