Readers’ creationist comments of the week

October 11, 2015 • 11:15 am

The creationists and fundies have been pretty quiet lately, but two readers have tried to inject their creationist views into the comments. Respond if you want; they’re not going to be posting here again.

First, reader “Joe” had this to say about the post “Ben Carson on evolution: an ignorant (or duplicitious) Presidential candidate”: 

Reality?? Why do atheists/evolutionists always assume that if someone doesn’t believe in evolution it’s because of his/her religious beliefs…in ‘reality’ it’s the other way around. These so called scientists who have accepted the ‘theory’ of evolution as fact and in turn the people who blindly believe what these so called ‘scientists’ say because they THINK it’s science because a ‘scientist’ said it…..it is these people that subsume reality because they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of God. During a debate on the issue, most will even go as far as saying that ‘maybe it was aliens who put us here’ once they see the complete idiocy of evolution and how ridiculous it really is. They, and probably yourself as well, will believe ANYTHING but God…….

Joe apparently doesn’t realize that virtually all opposition to evolution, whether in the US or elsewhere, comes from religion. Given the copious evidence for evolution (documented in A CERTAIN BOOK), the only reason to doubt it is religion: evolution clashes with religious stories of origins. After all, we don’t see organized opposition to the “theories” of gravity or relativity. Why not? It’s religion, stupid.

And Joe needs to read that book!

*******

Reader “Theo Philos” (what a name!) penned a poem in response to one on Intelligent Design I wrote earlier. He reproduced my poem before proffering his own pathetic effort as an attempted comment on the post (by Matthew Cobb) on “Excellent open access articles on the evolution of life on Earth.”

Dear Jerry,
a few days ago I read your Moar Poetry on Intelligent Design. I found it quite amusing. I penned a rebuttal poem, in jest, and I trust you will find no offense whatsoever in it, since none is intended.

Best Regards,

Theo

Intelligent Design [JAC: this is mine]
(with apologies to Joyce Kilmer)

I think that I shall never see
A theory dumber than ID.
It says that God can make a tree,
A beaver or a honeybee—
That God can simply get a whim
To make the small E. coli swim;
He waves his hand through Heaven’s air
And lo! Flagella everywhere!
But sometimes even God falls down
And makes a poor pathetic clown:
Yes, poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make Behe.

Random Mindless Evolution
(with apologies to Charles Darwin)

I think that I shall never see
A man —– than J. Coynee.
He believes Evolution can make a flea,
Even rational beings like you and me-
That Evolution can simply get a whim,
To take a toad and through “paste and trim”
Turn it into a dolphin than can leap and swim;
That with DNA, it built blood, bones, nerves & hair,
And Lo! Birds, fish, animals & people everywhere!
But eventually even Evolutionists will fall down,
They will trip on their pretensions, and simply frown;
Yes, poems are made by fools like “thee”,
But only the Creator can make you and me.

Umm. . . “no offense intended”? I think the blanks in line two say otherwise. And oy, the lack of scanning! You’ll notice that, in contrast, my lines scan perfectly.  As for the topic of the second poem, the less said, the better. (I’ll just note that evolution is not a completely random process.)

162 thoughts on “Readers’ creationist comments of the week”

  1. Love the “so-called scientists” epithet. Like you become a scientist because someone calls you “scientist”.

      1. Maybe he is referring to all those so called Creationist scientists and reverends?

        Not a bad poem. Very bad reasoning. But that is to be expected. Though they have tried to reason black is white, but subsequently died at a zebra crossing. (With apologies to Douglas Adams)

  2. To all IDers (including Joe and Theo): I’m an atheist. If any of you ever come up with any data that supports the existence of any god, I’ll be happy to consider it.

    1. This is the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point. Excellent!

      Why do religionists look for evidence (Bible codes, scientific creationism, reports of miracles, ad nauseam)? Because they know that even though faith is supposed to be enough, it isn’t, at least not to anyone who refuses to either put his or her brain on the shelf, or who refuses to be cowed by unevidenced religious threats.

      And yet, why do they not look at real evidence, instead of the made up, straw man, mendacious, or merely silly stuff that they, as creationists, spout? As PCC stated, because of religion, and only because of religion. I challenge anyone to find even one creationist who became a creationist based on scientific evidence, and didn’t simply approach the issue via confirmation bias from a preexisting religious condition.

      I think this fits in nicely with another of today’s threads, as “individual liberty” involves, among other things, keeping the theocrats (creationists one and all) at bay. My most recent, hopefully improving attempt to do so is here (scroll down in the thread; I go round and round with exoticdoc2, a hardcore, young-earth creationist). Feel free to critique it.

      1. I had heard about the bible code many years ago, but I had thought that surely no one could be so gullible that they believed that nonsense.
        A few years ago I had a student come to me with lots of literature and web sites about the bible code. He was sure I was going to be totally gob smacked once he showed me how it worked. Well, I did do a face palm (mentally), but not over the power of randomly choosing letters up, down, forward and backward and diagonally until you got… a couple words!

        1. You can find such codes in any written thing. It is a quirk of the human mind like pareidolia. See patterns everywhere even when they don’t exist. Apephenia is seeing patterns in complex systems regardless of their reality.

          The Psychology of ‘Knowing’
          by Benjamin Radford, Live Science Contributor | March 19, 2009 06:23am ET

          http://www.livescience.com/3415-psychology-knowing.html

          1. I remember that someone used a computer and a public domain text of “Moby Dick,” and found all sorts of things. You can do that with any sufficiently long text.

          2. Yes, I have heard of this one. That is the point. If you look hard enough and only count the ‘hits’ that show a pattern of words, then you are gonna find words.

        2. I just scanned Prof CC’s article above and it says “EVOLUTION IS FAKE”. Yes, it really does, if you look for the right letters and discard the ones that don’t fit and are therefore irrelevant. (I had to go through several lines to find a ‘k’ though – who would have thought it so rare? No wonder it’s worth 8 in Scrabble, IMO it should be worth 80).

          2. As a keen player of word games, I can assure you “K” is a pain in the neck. And just to make a liar of me there are three of the little fuckers, NOW 4!

          3. Well, in Hebrew, which is what you should use for these sorts of codes, PCC is really PKK, so…
            I have no idea what that means.

          8. I don’t find “K”s to be rare, but that may be the “availability heuristic” at work in my case.

    2. Of course, if there is a god, god should prove itself without relying on ancient texts or stupid people to come up with “evidence” that always falls short. The explanations as to why this god character remains in hiding are asinine and absurd.

  4. Well, Theo’s first two lines might scan if his blanks are one syllable each. But sadly, coming up with “J. Coynee” seems to have exhausted his poetic skills.

  5. what missironfistatheist said!

    these poems made me think of (and go back and quickly reread) Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man.” Expertly done, it’s a wonderful, pre-Darwin attempt to make sense of the natural world and why things are the way they are.

    1. Ah, yes. Essay on Man. Home of the immortal couplet:

      “Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
      For this plain reason, Man is not a fly.”

  6. “it is these people that subsume reality because they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of God.”

    Not sure how “subsume” fits into this statement, but Joe apparently believes that people believe in evolution because they’re atheists. He has the causation backwards.

    Instead, people often became atheists because they discover that evolution is true. Atheism is a conclusion, not an assumption.

    1. Certainly true in my own case. Raised as sincere a believer as you can find, but eventually realized that it didn’t hold water.

  7. “And oy, the lack of scanning!”

    What is it with creationists and language? I can almost understand their inability to distinguish metaphor from reality a la “DNA is a code so there must be a code writer”, because that requires at least a bit of abstract thought. But rhythm, meter, and scansion are within the intuitive range of the average child.

    1. Yes, the lot of them seem ignorant of not only science but of spelling and grammar, and now we see they don’t understand poetry either.

      1. Two words:

        Christian rock.

        Is there no end to the horror.

        OK, that one’s not actually rock, but its prouction required a kind of tone-deafness at so many levels. In fact, now that I think about it, it is a great metaphor for the difference between actual science and a typical DI publication. Confusing the two requires a serious lack of ear.

          3. That is AWESOME. I’m still laughing uncontrollably. “Jesus Christ is ma niggah”, said straight-faced by a middle-aged honky and his wife.
            (Also, 13 million views and 40,000 comments.)

            I almost feel sorry for the guy. After all, most people’s wild misjudgement only gets them ten seconds on Fail of the Month, this poor guy is stuck up there on YouBoob forever.

            (Obligatory link to that other classic, Gimme dat Christian Side-hug:
            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJAMu9cUtIc )

          4. I got one on Facebook the other day from my second cousin – he said watching it would make me see how awesome Jesus is, and I would get goosebumps just watching it.

            So I did. It was an interpretative dance where a women whose life goes bad gets saved by a character in a white robe stopping all the bad guys get her. It ends with him folding her lovingly in his arms.

            No goosebumps. A play isn’t proof dude, any more than a book of fables.

          5. So that’s whatever became of Vanilla Ice?

            Now we know, as Casey Kasem used to say, “the rest of the story.”

    3. they are desperately afraid of anything that would make them think differently than they do. If they admit that there is meaning to words and grammar, then their “interpretations” of the bible fail tremendously.

    5. “But rhythm, meter, and scansion are within the intuitive range of the average child.”

      Hmmm, not this child. I’m sure my attempt would be no better than Theo Philos.

      1. You think? But wouldn’t you know, just reading through it, that the rhythm came out wrong?

        If I made an attempt and it came out that badly, I’d know it. I’d either re-work it or just not post it at all.

        cr

        1. “But wouldn’t you know, just reading through it, that the rhythm came out wrong?”

          Probably not. I posted a rhyme on Facebook and a friend told me my rhythm was off. It read fine to me. She may be have wrong, but I wouldn’t count on it.

          I had no idea what a “scan” was until this post. I’ll assume that we covered it at some point in grade school, but I don’t recall it.

          Funny, but just the other day I asked a grade school teacher how to read a haiku and she said it didn’t matter.

          1. ‘There was a young woman named Nan
            whose poetry just didn’t scan.
            When friends asked her why
            She said “It’s cos I
            Always try to cram as many words in the last line as I possibly can.”‘

          3. There was a young poet from China
            With scansion demonstrably finer,
            But his poems would tend
            To come to an end
            Quite suddenly

    6. What is it with creationists and language?

      Low g factor might account for their spectrum of deficiencies.

  8. One good thing about creationists is their unwavering willingness to expose their own ignorance of what evolutionary theory actually says.

    1. They are the die hards. Most others have embraced an ungainly kludge of a hybrid of Theology and Biology. Though Evolution doesn’t address where and how life began, they like to try anyway.

      They tell us to listen to the idea that something comes from nothing, but only on their terms with their do anything deity. We are more hobbled at the time. But physicists are working on it night and day for an answer.

  9. “…it is these people that subsume reality because they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of God.”

    Hey Joe, if you troubled yourself to put a book in your hand, you would find that a very significant percentage of the people who accept evolution or lack a belief in God (and they are two distinctly different things)come from a background of very deep belief in, or understanding of, religious claims. Almost without exception, we will tell you that it was our study of reality that led us to either include evolution in our theology or reject the notion of gods altogether. You are projecting your own weaknesses onto others. You better run way down south to the book store and pick up WEIT and FvF and get yourself free.

    …with abject apologies. Try the

    Otis Taylor

  11. Debating a creationist is a waste of time. However just engaging them in a debate is a win for them.

    1. Wrong doing nothing and they win. Their side gets to spout off any thing they want without the need to defend it. Engagement is the only way in open forums. Otherewise their side is the only side. Scientists work in their “ivied” towers away from the rest of us.

      Are you a Creationist, you certainly have what they want. To dissuade any arguments or criticisms or analysis.

      1. As nightgaunt said, not countering their lies allows them to spread such harmful nonsense.

        Debating a creationist is not a waste of time. Engaging in a debate shows that they depend on willful ignorance, attacking long outdated ideas, quote-mining, and outright lies to support their religion.

        1. That’s pretty much my take on it. They might be hopeless, but there are onlookers, and we don’t want them to come away with the idea that the creationist is anything other than a charlatan, an ignoramus, or a loon.

          1. Depends on what you mean by debate. Structured formal debates are usually a loser as the time and format constraints mean the biggest BS shoveler can leave unanswered points on the table. Written debate, OTOH, carries none of the prestige of sharing a stage, and all the risk of having your posts thoroughly fisked. I think it should be done as much as possible and dogpile style.

          2. Agreed, even though Bill Nye did mop the floor with Ken Ham. I do mean responding to the nonsense the creationists post all over the internet.

            After I say whatever I have to say in response to what was said, I often post this list of sources (if anyone has any that I absolutely should add, please let me know!):

            Here are some good books about the *evidence* for evolution:

            1) Carl Sagan “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” (how science works).

            2) Jerry Coyne “Why Evolution is True”
            3) Richard Dawkins “The Greatest Show on Earth” (two overviews of the convergent multiple lines of evidence for evolution).

            4) Donald Prothero “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters” (the fossil evidence).

            5) Sean B. Carroll “The Making of the Fittest” (the DNA evidence).

            6) Jonathan Weiner “The Beak of the Finch” (experimental evidence; real-time evolution).

            7) Neil Shubin “Your Inner Fish” (evidence of evolution as seen in the human body)

            8) Matt Ridley “The Red Queen” (evolutionary “arms races”)

            9) Carl Zimmer “Parasite Rex” (the history and evolution of parasites)

            Also these web sites:

            29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

            A Complete on-line course at http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

          3. And what is hopeless? If someone huffs off today, did you waste your time or did you plant the seed of real knowledge that will eventually help them to see clearly? From my first encounter with the idea of evolution to telling one other close friend I no longer believed probably ten years elapsed.

  12. Wouldn’t Dembski be more euphonious for your last line? You have to hit the accent wrong in either case.

    And oy, the lack of scanning!

    It’s like they weren’t even trying.

  13. Why is it so many creationists believe in a God who (which?) would demand non-dynamicism immediately after giving Adam and Eve the first choice?

  14. No matter how carefully one feeds a series of generalized principles like variation + selection –> natural selection, along with enumerable examples and other supporting facts, a creationist will not process it in a matter that leaves it intact. It is like the material goes into a code scrambler in their head, and comes out completely adulterated. An example of variation + selection –> adaptation of populations comes out: ‘scientist sez variation, then poof! adaptation!’ Different versions of this old canard are among the most common things coming from them: That we say that natural selection is just some sort of random process that creates new designs. No, we do not say that. Ever. Your brain is on ‘puree’ again. Get it fixed.

    2. It may be that a brain on religion is indoctrinated that way. Here is an article on research on conspiracy theories who also claim patterns where none exist:

      “However, there was no link between people’s conspiracist thinking and their ability to judge randomness. Which is probably reasonable, since imagining a conspiracy of malevolent people is quite different from guessing whether a series of letters is random or not. Attributing human intention to things might be quite a different process, so the researchers tweaked the experiment.”

      “The same results showed up again: conspiracy theorists weren’t more likely to assume cheating. There were other interesting links, though: pessimists were more likely to see cheating, and people with more right-wing political beliefs were ever so slightly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.”

      “Although the researchers didn’t find what they thought they were going to find, they do note that these negative results have echoes in other experiments. For instance, some research suggests that climate change denial has less to do with scientific literacy than ideological and cultural factors. Maybe conspiracy theories in general are caused more by what people think is right and where they see themselves belonging, and less to do with how they process information.”

      [ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/do-conspiracy-theorists-see-more-patterns-in-randomness-apparently-not/ ]

      I haven’t checked the research to see if it looks good. But I found it interesting so far, if these ‘puree brains’ are scrambling their output at the very end. Then they are fooling themselves more than anything, and they are set to perpetuate the scrambling process yet another generation.

      As opposed to the scientists doing the experiments I would expect a religious brain is “infected” rather than a case of faulty wiring.

      2. Very interesting. What you are pointing out made me realize something of an error on my part about the ‘scrambling’ process, and so I am glad to walk it back if need be.
        It makes more sense, really, that creationists (and others that are indoctrinated like conspiracy theorists) do not really scramble inputs so that what comes out is random. Their alteration of what is said is more systematic than that. I now realize (and I knew this, just did not think of it) that they selectively edit and remodel the inputs into a form that comports with their world views. To a creationist the claims of scientists must be wrong, and so what scientists say is censored and modified in their brains into a straw man statement that they, as ‘reasonable people’, get to knock down. Conspiracy theorists probably do the same thing. Heck, I expect we all do a bit of this from time to time. But it is a matter of degree.

        1. Confirmartion bias without any means of overriding it. Putting emotion into it and it is subjective and hard to dislodge once set. Objectivity is dispassionate and analytical and less likely to make a Class 1 error.

        2. But the ‘puree’ brain is ROTFL material, so we have to keep it in there. [Yes, we are all doing it…]

        3. I think it comes down to having their priorities wrong. Wrong in the context of what works best for figuring out reality that is. They have a prior commitment to their god beliefs. That comes first.

          I suspect they do sometimes evaluate information more or less like you or I do, for mundane things like is it better to cross the street when vehicles moving across your path or when your path is clear. But when it is something that appears to conflict with their god beliefs? When that happens then they first evaluate information for conflicts with their god beliefs. When the information conflicts then they rationalize a reformulation of the information that allows it to fit with their god beliefs.

          That may entail a reformulation that which supports the conclusion that the information is false, such as complete denial of macro evolution, or a reformulation with merely subtle differences, such as evolution is fine but god inserted souls into humans.

          But it all starts with that prior commitment that changes their evaluation process from assess data then formulate conclusions that explain it to form conclusion then assess data for conformation to that conclusion. And that prior commitment is based on strong emotions, not reason, which often includes strong feelings that it is morally wrong to conflict with their god beliefs.

          And we all do this to one extent or another. Just replace religion as the prior commitment to any strongly held belief. But some people are worse than others and in the real world degrees do matter. A lot.

      3. Surely climate change denial has to do with ideological factors, and not with scientific literacy or illiteracy, nor with any lack of something between one’s ears, though perhaps that helps. It is part of a package of right-wing thought that is mainly, I think, American, though it seems to have been trsvelling recently. I was shocked when I first came across it, since I could not see what possible connexion beliefs in trickle-down tax-cuts that don’t in fact trickle down, in the right to possess, with no questions asked, as many guns as possible and of as murderous a quality as possible, with no questions asked, in the sanctity of certain interpretations of the Second Amendment, in the vile-ness of abortion and gay marriage and food stamps, and in the fecklessness of the poor and of black fathers and black single mothers, etc – I could not see what possible connexion such beliefs had with the question whether or not the climate was changing. But this little package + the denial of climate change seems to be de rigueur if you are sufficiently on the right, even if you are highly intelligent and knowledgeable enough to be a university professor, as is a certain acquaintance of mine who is also a fervent Roman Catholic. I find it very curious.

        1. Well, ideally, if science literacy were more complete, ideological matters that prevent accepting climate change, evolution, etc. would be harder to adopt in the first place …

  15. @Joe: “… they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of [an absolute and unequivocal claim of a specific brand of religious magic].”

    Atheism is at its broadest skepticism directed at religion. You can’t deny that which you lack any evidence for in the first place. What you should do, must do if you are rational, is to reject the unsupported claim.

    Therefore it is self evident that such rationality isn’t an irrational ‘absolute and unequivocal’ position. That would be a silly position, don’t you think?

    Why, any observational evidence of your preferred brand of magic would have the entire world withdraw their rejection. We are – still, after many millenniums of various religious claims – waiting…

  16. Most people want to believe that their lives have some inherent meaning. In other words, they cannot accept the notion that no deity put them on this planet to carry out his plan. Life is short and often brutal and when you’re dead you’re dead for good. Most people, especially the religiously indoctrinated, would be psychologically destroyed to accept the previous sentence. Religion creates a fantasy universe that allows people to get through the day without being in total despair. This is why it is so difficult for most people to become atheists. If they find the current religion that they belong to unsatisfactory for whatever reason, they do not become atheists, but shop around for another religion that meets their worldly needs but still promises eternal bliss.

    It is always good to hear about religious people who have become atheists. The polls indicate that the United States is becoming more secular. But, I fear that religion will always be a major force in American society. The human need to believe there is some inherent purpose in life, combined with the fear of death, will compel most people who cannot accept the harsh realities of existence to migrate to the religious explanation of the universe. Creationism is one aspect of that explanation and crucial to it.

    A possibility exists that the faithful will eventually become a minority in the United States. However, one must keep in mind that throughout American history there have been periods when religious enthusiasm has waxed. It is likely to happen again. But, no matter what the historical period, the goal of secularists should be to keep religion out of the public square. For me, I don’t particularly care if a person is religious as long as that person doesn’t try to impose his/her beliefs on me. Otherwise, if a person needs to live with a delusion to get through the day, I say “good luck.”

      1. You are correct that not all people believe there is an inherent purpose to life, although I suspect most do, at least in the United States, based on the fact that most Americans are religious to varying degrees. But, I wonder if this may be the default state of the human animal. That is, are humans born with a belief that life has a purpose and only do some of them after growing older and having some exposure to science realize that life has no inherent purpose? Or, may it be the other way around? Are people born with no such belief and only after indoctrination through such institutions as religion come to believe life has an inherent purpose? I have thought about this question often, but since I totally lack the knowledge to even approach answering it, I am always left in a quandary

      2. If we want meaning we will have to do it to make it so. We will have to write that book of human meaning or nothing will come of us.

    2. “However, one must keep in mind that throughout American history there have been periods when religious enthusiasm has waxed.”

      One certainly gets the sense that this is one of those periods, despite some numbers suggesting the opposite.

      It would be interesting to know if religious fervor varies inversely with the number of believers in a way that keeps the net social pathogenicity constant.

  17. I would like to address the first commenter who claimed that we will speculate that it was aliens that put us here. There is a possibility that biomolecules from space contributed to the early steps of organic evolution (and there is intriguing evidence for that, but it does not have to be true). But no, no one on our side says that maybe aliens put us here end stop. I am not sure what this person means, but perhaps he/she was addressing a point that comes up in debates with creationists where we might say, by way of comparison, that our origins here are more likely the work of aliens than the work of gods. Do you see the difference? The difference is huge. That it was the work of aliens is vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that we can be confident that it did not happen that way. But however unlikely is ‘vanishingly unlikely’, the odds that we were put here by laws-of-physics-denyin’ gawds is, oh, lets say a zillion zillion zillion zillion times less likely. Even if I am off by a couple zillion orders of magnitude, it does not matter. There is a difference between the vanishingly unlikely but still physically possible to the physically impossible and so dismissible. Aliens are possible. Aliens with interstellar travel is… well, maybe not impossible but not at all likely (and i am sorry for that, but lets get real). That we even bring them up is to just compare how silly that idea is to how extraordinarily bonkers is their idea. That life originated and evolved on earth is, btw, waaaay more likely, and faaaarr more possible, according to facts we have now.

    Now, I know the regulars here understand the difference between what the creationist said that we say, and what we actually say. But if they are consistent (and boy, are they ever consistent), their brain scrambler will prevent them from processing this correctly.

    1. Panspermia just adds another part of where life came from. It seems to come from out there, in space. Or at least the constituents necessary for life to being are out there and crash here to grow or die. One doesn’t need intelligent life to “seed” the galaxies to get it. Life just may be more common than suspected. Though doesn’t mean they will be close to us in biochemistry. But it is more likely such life will be.

      With so much time and distance we will be lucky to find more life outside our solar system. It would be in our survival to spread out but until there is a means found to speed up our travel it will be centuries before it happens, if ever.

      In a 100 plus years the Earth as we know it will be unrecognizable as it moves into a Hot House phase as bad as the Late Permian. That will be an inhospitable place to live.

      1. There are maybe different forms of panspermia, but I am not sure. Lets say, b/c it is interesting, that a weak form of panspermia is that the earth was seeded with nucleotides and amino acids from space, and that these helped jump start organic evolution –> the early replicators. This is a perfectly reasonable but perhaps untestable hypothesis.
        The strong form of panspermia is that earth was seeded by frozen cells that came from the relics of dead worlds. This is very very unlikely, but not impossible. I don’t believe it, personally.
        The super-duper form of panspermia is that aliens done it. This is the least likely of the three, by far.
        Goddidit? Not physically possible by any hint of evidence anywhere.

  18. I don’t mean to be difficult, but I really do not understand. If “evolution is not a completely random process”, then it is partly random (which I do understand). But if we are to be determinist, how do we reconcile that with randomness? Sorry, but I just don’t get it.

    1. Not sure if this is adequate, but as I would understand it, randomness in the physical processes out of which we are made does not imply choice at the level of human consciousness. The randomness of mutations in your DNA was not a choice you made. Your future behavior was determined at the time the random events happened. Determinism is retrospective, it is not the same as predictability.

      1. “Determinism is retrospective, it is not the same as predictability.”

        I don’t know what that means. I thought that such things were not predictable just because no one was there to predict them — or to whom predict them.

        It remains that if mutation is random, that makes a macroscopic (non-quantum) randomness which — it seems to me — plays havoc with determinism. (It’s really a minefield, this idea, isn’t it?)

        1. “I don’t know what that means.”

          I don’t either, I was hoping you would.

          What I think I meant was that determinism doesn’t mean that a predictable, non-random path exists for the future. It means that while some aspects of your future choices are random, they are still not under your conscious control. Determinism means that when you look back at your cognitive processes or choices, you can’t conclude that you consciously controlled them. It doesn’t mean that all the chemistry and physics that will control your future choices can be predicted in advance, or that your choices are predetermined.

          Actually that’s what I meant. Determinism is not the same as predestination. Randomness is irrelevant to determinism.

    2. I lack the allele for being able to remember what is determinism vs compatibalism 3 seconds after learning about them, but I can describe evolution without them.
      The kind of evolution that is most often described in these sorts of debates is evolution by natural selection. Natural selection is a kind of evolution that has both a random and a non-random component. The random part is mutation. Mutations are random in that they occur regardless of the needs of the organism. Random mutation builds genetic diversity in populations and this diversity includes individuals who are more fit, and others that are less fit. The non-random component of natural selection is selection by the environment. Some individuals, by virtue of the traits they have b/c of their genes, are more fit and these tend to leave more descendants than individuals who are less fit.
      That is evolution by natural selection. Evolution per se also has a degree of random change in allele frequency from generation to generation. Sometimes, even less fit alleles increase in frequency because of this. Finally, there are plenty of mutations that are neutral to selection in that they are neither more, nor less fit. These will randomly fluctuate too. Random changes in allele frequencies can not build adaptations, but they can be important, especially in small populations.

    3. Genetic variation is random. But which individuals on average survive is not random.

      The individuals with variations that aid survival survive at greater rates than individuals with variations that inhibit survival. Thus natural selection is not random.

      I’m not sure if this answered your question. I recommend a certain book on evolution linked here.

      1. Of course. Any time a creationist says that evolution is “a random process,” that’s the clearest possible signal (except, perhaps, for asking “then why are there still monkeys?”) that they are either charlatans, hopelessly ignorant, or engaged in the process of constructing a straw man that they will then proceed to hew down mightily.

    4. In the phrase “random mutations,” random does not mean non-deterministic. It does mean purposeless both in the sense that there is no agency involved (duh) and that it is not the result of any process that, by its nature, would probabilistically favor a particular direction of change of fitness (i.e. increase, decrease or neutral change of fitness).

      But, the processes that result in mutations, and there are many not just one, still obey the probabilistic laws of nature that all processes we know of do.

      If you had enough information about the states of all the matter and energy associated with a particular mutation event, you could in principle predict what mutation would occur. The trick is that it may not be possible to know all of the necessary information or be able to process it. Just like predicting the weather. At the level of climate we can do that fairly well. At the level of what will the weather be, specifically, three days from now in Honeo Path SC? Can’t do that worth a shit.

  19. I would suggest that on a fundamental level mutations are indeed random. They arise from the behaviour of electrons during the chemical reactions involved in DNA replication. Due to the laws of quantum mechanics all chemical reactions have a degree of randomness built in. Mutations in DNA are no different in this respect. The unique thing about mutations is that occasionally, due to DNA replication, their effects are noticed on a macro level and if adaptive they will be amplified on a large scale. I am not a physical chemist – I trained in biochemistry – so apologies if this misses something fundamental, but it makes sense to me.

    1. Just recall that they become less random as the favored characteristics become more and more predominate in whatever niche they are in.

    1. Isn’t “it might have been aliens” an ID/creationist dodge? How dare Joe try to stick that one on us.
      –
      I would say no generally. Some have used it to meld the religious mythology with the space mythology following a similar idea. Humans can’t do it on their own. We always need a hand up. That part I really don’t like. Some preachers will call such things as “abductions” to be simply demons finding a new means of fooling humans. And there is that part about angels sometimes helping some people and leaving many others to die or be mutilated. Not very fair is it?

      For some reason cryptozoology has captured the Creationists in their misunderstanding of Evolution think species that are extinct or not yet classified should be by what Evolution says will somehow contradict it. Well dragon flies, coelocanths and platypuses don’t contradict evolution either. But possible “sea serpents” must be dinos that survived the one and only flood which would “prove” the idea and facts of evolution wrong.

    2. I’m guessing this is an allusion to something Richard Dawkins said in Expelled:

      It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

      https://youtu.be/SL7CCyuXAS4?t=38

      1. That’s a personally meaningful clip to me. An argument on Twi**er with Joe C—, a die-hard creationist, who consistently misrepresented Dawkins’s statements (he claimed that Richard believed that aliens *did* design life on Earth), introduced me to the anti-scientific religious mindset and thence the gnu atheist movement (and subsequently WEIT).

        /@

      2. Thank you, I wasn’t familiar with that.

        I was referring to IDers wink, wink, nudge, nudge that the Designer didn’t have to be god but, hey, could have been an alien.

      3. I seem to remember that it was Jacob Bronowski who suggested that life arose on Earth possibly in consequence of Earth’s being ‘seeded’ is some way from outer space.

        1. Panspermia’s had many fathers (heh) over time. Francis Crick entertained the idea. Wikipedia traces its scientifically hypothesized history back to the 19th century. And then there was Gene Roddenberry. 🙂

  21. Let’s not get too indignant,
    all TheoJoe are telling us
    and as if we don’t know,
    there is a long way, to go!
    I’m a bad poet but I know it.

  22. The only thing that comes to mind on these two examples is: On the first one – please find a person who has a basic understanding and education in Evolution who rejects it, for other than religious reasons? And the second person’s poem kind of proves the first. Should also try very hard to stay away from rebuttal poems.

  24. “And oy, the lack of scanning! You’ll notice that, in contrast, my lines scan perfectly.”

    Have you never heard of the great McGonagall (or which Theo Philos’ poem immediately reminded me).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tay_Bridge_Disaster

    Here’s a bit –
    “Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
    Alas! I am very sorry to say
    That ninety lives have been taken away
    On the last sabbath day of 1879
    Which will be remember’d for a very long time.”

    cr

  25. There once was a creationist on WEIT,
    Who blathered on as was his right,
    Claimed evolution was random,
    Defending arguments not even bantham,
    Reinforcing the notion of faith as a blight.

  26. Hmmm… perhaps a sonnet might also be in order….

    The form of a man’s the form of ape,
    The DNA of mans’ largely that way too,
    The fossil record shows a progressing shape,
    That from a common ancestor both of us grew,
    We clearly see the vestiges of a tail
    To link us with the ordinary newt
    Which confirms quite clearly Evolutions trail,
    Giving further evidence one can’t refute.
    Yet there still seems to be a steady supply
    Of idiots who believe that we’re unique,
    Created by some super-daddy in the sky,
    And made “in his image” in just one week.
    Suggesting quite clearly that Creationists must,
    Be closer to the monkeys than the rest of us

  27. it is these people that subsume reality because they absolutely and unequivocally deny any existence of God”

    “subsume” I don’t think that words means what you think it means.

        1. HFB beat me to it. I was going to suggest the term must mean a quantum god who may or may not exist until we can open the box. Perhaps a double slit experiment would reveal something about this god thing.

          1. Perhaps a double slit experiment would reveal something about this god thing.

            It did: He plays dice with the universe.

      4. Hah! Indeed. Listening to spiritual people leads one to suppose that a small bit of existence of god is enough. The full smiting war god is a bit scary, but a hardly existent wooish “oneness” is comforting.

  28. “Evolutionists.” What an idiotic and meaningless term. Besides the fact that no one accepts evolution as a dogmatic ideology, which is implied by the word, where are all the gravitists, therodynamicists, big bangists, and so forth? I’ll concede that big bangist might catch on, for these terms are simply a cover for creationists to attempt to apply faith to positions supported by fact and divert attention from the actual evidence.

    1. “Evolutionists” always strikes me that way, too. But it’s one of those usages that varies from country to country; IIANM, it is a rather common usage in the UK for what we would call evolutionary scientists.

      The “-ist” ending is inconsistent; while it often connotes bigotry or dogmatism–sexist, racist, etc–there are quite similar usages meant to convey positive stances–feminist and environmentalist, e.g.

      (And I’m one of those suggesting that we embrace “scientism” and try to move it from the pejorative column into the righteous one. But I digress 😀 )

        1. I wrestled with that one… 😀

          In my suggested sense, yes, but the way it’s generally employed I think it would have to be the mellifluous scientismist.

          1. “The mellifluous scientismist”

            Sounds like either a Ray Bradbury story, or a late 19th century opera.

          3. Just finished Dandelion Wine, and realized I still hadn’t read enough Bradbury, so now I’m on The October Country.

  29. In the spirit of poetry, I offer a limerick:

    There once was an ignorant man
    Who kept his head buried in sand
    He said a few words
    About the miracle of birds
    And then was mocked all over the land.

    1. That isn’t a proper limerick, it isn’t rude 😉

      (Seriously, if that’s not the wrong word in this context, there seems to be something about the limerick form that encourages risque-ness. Why this should be I don’t know, but can anyone point to a serious poem written in limerick form?)

      cr

      1. I think “serious limerick” is a candidate for oxymoron status (though I’m sure some exist). I don’t think all limericks need to be risqué, though; mere humor will do.

          1. There was a young man from Japan Who wrote verse that never would scan When they said, but the thing Doesn’t go with a swing He said, Yes, but I like to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can

            /@

          5. LOL!

            Oh, I have nothing against the risqué ones! Just making a claim for a bit broader definition than yours. 😀

          6. Actually, to answer my original question, I think it’s the verse form, where the first two long lines, followed by the two shorter ones, just naturally set up for a punchline at the end.

            That’s my theory, anyway.

            cr

          9. “Evolutionist” as an insult? Why not “Cell Theoryist”?

            While teaching science, I have never had a student dispute the cell theory, and yet in that “theory” (sarcastic scare quotes)one postulate implies common ancestry right back to the first blue-green algae or equivalent candidate.

            With this in mind I offer a not very scanny limerick:

            There once was a Theory of the Cell
            With an ungodly postulate — Do tell!
            Every cell came from a pre-existing one
            It’s occurred since the rising of the sun
            Believe this and you’ll go to hell!

      2. Geez…We have a tough crowd here. I’ll give it another go with the insulting variety…

        A man of God was quite dumbstruck
        At the thought that life is nothing but luck
        But he soon came to realize
        Despite the claims about eyes
        That Yahweh’s an incompetent fuck.

      3. Yes, limericks typically tend to be bawdy. If you don’t believe me, ask The Man from Nantucket …

        1. Here we are, said better than I could, stolen from Wikipedia

          The limerick packs laughs anatomical
          Into space that is quite economical.
          But the good ones I’ve seen
          So seldom are clean
          And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

          (Note that for it to scan, “limericK” has to be spoken as “lim’rick”)

          cr

    1. Volume 3, Number 1, June-July 2013, of the Crocoduck Journal. But, I think it’s behind a paywall…

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