Here’s a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don’t read it, and I suspect most of you don’t either, but we aren’t average—we’re freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it’s a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, “Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”
About a third of the respondents currently answer “yes,” which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a lot of them. Here’s a quick sampling of the creationist point of view:
Question????When the dinosaurs were destroyed,how come mankind was not destroyed with them?As we also would have been elimated.
By the tone of your article you seem to be ignoring the many scientists who do not agree with the Billions of years age of the earth. As an engineer with a masters degree, i have many questions about some of the claims of the old earth guyes. I have many books from several scientific fields that look at the evidence available and come to a different conclusion.Your “scientists” are ignoring discoveries that support the presence of dinosaurs in recent times. Like zealeous Prosecutors, they seem to be unwilling to look at anything that doesn’t help prove their case.
the Bible clearly says all things were made by God appr. 6400 years ago.If you believe the Bible, then no problem.If you think a day has a different length of time then 24 hours, then you don’t believe the Bible and you are just blowing with the wind and you’ll believe anything you want to. How do you know that dino’s were mean & scarey? Of course they rode the ark…BABIES MAYBE?
I am a college professor in Mathematics and visited the Creation Museum a little over a week ago. I found it both fascinating and meaningful. The exhibits were world class and highly instructive. And the planetarium is, perhaps, the best in the world. I highly recommend it.
If dinosaurs died out millions of years ago how is it possible that their bones have not completely decomposed? I understand fossils being that old … but do you really think bones could last that long? The earth is not as old as some might project.
I think it’s about time someone made a good museum that tells the truth, instead of telling people what our schools and litterature are telling them.
Key words in a definition of the word science are observable, subject to experimentation, verifiable and repeatable. Did any scientist observe,verify or perform an experiment that indicates that dinosaurs were extinct 64 million years before man appeared or that Noah had trouble finding a pair of dinosaurs? Those who make these statements are outside the realm of science.
Pretty dismal stuff, isn’t it? A few brave people are putting up rebuttals, but it’s like a whole rising sea of treacly stupidity out there.
An engineer and a mathematician. Again with these engineers giving their profession a bad name.
What is up with the creationist/engineer thing?
phat
Yeah, let’s all read the bible, because that’s the only source of truth. Then we won’t have to worry about ethanol (not in the bible), oil (not in the bible), TB (not in the bible) among caribou (not in the bible).
Hell, half the things I eat aren’t in the bible. According to the bible, I must weigh at least 45 pounds less.
Woo-hoo! C’mon ladies, I’m svelt and sexy!
No True Engineer would believe in creationism.
Yeah, those creato-geneers really get on my nerves. I are one, and everything engineerey is based on practical application of science. Arrrrgh! I am so disappointed that my fellow engineers believe in magic and pixies.
Oh. I just threw up a little in my mouth when I read the comments.
I happen to be an engineer. My pride in that was quickly squashed when I got out in the working world and ran into “an engineer with a masters degree” discussing a shuttle mission. We were listening to the radio and the NASA spokesman was explaining how the shuttle had turn around so it could fire it’s engine to get out of its orbit.
After trying to discuss this with this “engineer with a masters degree”, I was struck dumb with the realisation that he didn’t understand basic orbital mechanics or the idea of inertia.
Shortly after that, I ran into another engineer who sincerely told me he didn’t need anymore training because he learned all he would ever need to know in school (the company built computerized security systems).
I’m a geophysicist and an atheis; all of my family are looney-tunes christians, all of whom believe the biblical bullshit doled out by slimy preachers like Haggard, and smarmy con-men like Ken Ham. It’s depressing indeed.
PZ, you are completely correct in your view that reading Parade magazine is a way to find out what the average American thinks about. Actually, I don’t think the average American thinks about much at all.
Reading the comments after the Parade article is horrifying.
Ironic that the article appears under the heading ‘Intelligence Report.’
or that Noah had trouble finding a pair of dinosaurs?
Of course Noah didn’t have trouble finding a pair of dinosaurs. Noah didn’t have trouble finding whatever you want, my creationist friend. Anything you want, you just say it and Noah didn’t have trouble finding it. There, now everything is okay in happy land again for you. :-)
Aren’t engineers alot like dentists?
I suspect the reason we hear so much about creationist engineers are two-fold. The first is that engineers have some of the “smart technical guy” mystique that scientists have in the popular view (which, yes, usually does imagine both as guys) and thus are easy enough for the general public to conflate with people who know something about science, so creationist engineers, who seem to be more numerous than creationist scientists, can be deployed as illusionary buttresses for the creationists’ case. The reason they’re more numerous, I suspect, is that despite being highly technical engineers aren’t required to think like scientists, and are likely to be somewhat biased towards thinking of complex things in terms of design since that’s what they do all day.
Hmm. I could have phrased that more articulately, I suppose…
The thing that appalls me is that so many of these people who claim to be engineers or doctors or mathematicians and so on write in a fashion that’s almost impossible to square with the level of education needed to legitimately practice those professions.
What’s up with all the engineers and mathematicians? Well, they are not any different than any other non-biologist: They are laymen, from a biology point of view. Just because you studied xyz doesn’t make you a universal science genius.
I am a computer scientist, and while I have specialized in SofComputing, which includes Evolutionary Algorithms as a sub-field, my knowledge of EvoDevo is far from the level that a biologist would have. The CS department at my school is attached to the natural sciences and we probably get taught more of a science than an engineering approach, which differentiates us from most German universities as far as CS is concerned. Other people get taught the same subject in an engineering manner, which, I presume, emphasizes a `design’ perspective.
So, you have a bunch of people running around, who have a university degree but are not scientists. They have little idea regarding scientific methods (although they might be great engineers/doctors/mathematicians) and even less knowledge of biology, BUT they have an opinion. And that’s a bad combination: no clue + bad opinion = nonsense argument
So, there actually should not be a question like “what’s with the engineers/dentists etc.”
They are just amateurs who actually have no idea about the details of biology but an opinion about religion… like most people. And that is true especially for engineers, because what they do is build and design, they have that view of the world and transfer it to other fields… -> unable to think outside their own box
All too often, an engineer’s brain is a closed system.
Sometimes I turn on the Fox News or look at a People or Parade magazine or some such just for kicks. I always end up a little closer to jamming an ice pick into some soft part of my head. But I AM getting better at dealing with it. I’ve found it is best to just sort smile a little bit. You know that Christian smile. Sure I die a little on the inside, but people will never stop being stupid.
Actually, this might not be a pro-Cretinism comment; it might just be a poorly spelled attempt to apply logic to one particular piece of Cretinist stupidity.
In that light it’s a fair question. If humans and dinosaurs ever co-existed, how could one be destroyed but not the other?
“Question????When the dinosaurs were destroyed,how come mankind was not destroyed with them?As we also would have been elimated.”
I can read this comment as a poorly worded (and spelled) criticism of the museum. If I may attempt to rephrase: “Query: if dinosaurs and mankind co-existed as the creationists claim, and some event occurred to destroy the dinosaurs, why didn’t that event also eliminate us? HA! PWNED!!!!”
Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got it!
The dinosaurs simply disappeared. They were Raptured straight into Heaven.
See, they’ve been misreading the Bible all of these years: the Second Coming was all about the dinosaurs, who were the only ones worthy of being Saved. The rest of us have been living in that 1000 year thingy that comes after Armageddon. Or is it Armageddon? I can’t keep the mythology straight: all I know is that the dinosaurs are gone because Jesus took them to Heaven.
Question????When the dinosaurs were destroyed,how come mankind was not destroyed with them?As we also would have been elimated.
Man, I initially thought this was the beginning of a sane comment, until I realized it was supposed to be an argument in favor of creationism…
“…all I know is that the dinosaurs are gone because Jesus took them to Heaven.”
And you can take it from me, ’cause I’m an engineer.
The capacity for Americans to speak out of their asses is astounding. What % of those folks above are in any position to dispute the scientific evidence? Part of the blame has got to go to talk show culture, where everyone is democratically “entitled” to whatever inane opinions they might have.
Without the benefit of polls, it’s difficult to flip on the TV and ascertain whether a particular position is held by 75%, 99%, or 99.999% of scientists. That .001% becomes a human interest story, and winds up getting a disproportionate amount of attention.
As for engineers, toss in mathematicians and programmers. Their fields don’t really require them to keep their feet on the ground and stay in touch with the interlocking pieces that make up the world. They can neatly stow all the God stuff in one corner of the brain, and the math in another…compartmentalization.
It’s stupid out there.
Of course Dinosaurs & Man coexisted… Some rich guy made a dinosaur theme park on a small island near Costa Rica. Michael Crichton wrote it, so it must be true, right?
Hey, how else am I going to get my weekly fill of Howard Huge?
Is this any surprise coming from a weekly circular which has on its very first page questions about celebrities? and carries an question/answer column from the person who claims to have the worlds highest IQ?
Gah … didn’t realize they had a website now….
Folks, I think the venerable “PYGMIES+DWARFS” may have a competitor. Really, I expect these people to just come out and start yelling “TWINKIE HOUSE” any minute now.
Parade is bundled with one of my Sunday newspapers. I usually give it a quick scan over breakfast to see what’s going on in hoi polloi land. Marilyn Vos Savant is sometimes entertaining (although not to be trusted too far when she pontificates on math; she went off the rails on the Wiles proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem) and “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” is not to be missed. Why? It’s ghosted by none other than Edward Klein (the hack writer responsible for the misnamed Truth About Hillary). Klein sometimes runs a right-wing banner up the flagpole just to see if anyone salutes. It bears watching with a sharp eye. Daily Kos had a post about Klein about a month ago: [Link]
Parade, National Geographic… What’s the difference?
Okay, I’m done being sarcastic now.
Meh. Bunch of folks running the standard creobot playbook page by page.
“Carbon dating is flawed.”
“Where are all the transitionals.”
“Mutations are not evolution.”
“It takes more faith…”
“You have no evidence.”
“The Bible says…”
Call them on any of their nonfactual claims, and they whip out the persecution banner while simultaneously claiming they just can’t see why evolutionists are so ignorant. (and mean)
Generally I dive into such frays for the sake of the lurkers who might be swayed, but are there any present? Are there any non-mouthbreathing habitual readers of Parade?
Maybe these engineers are train drivers?
I hope so…
The general public has such a warped idea of Engineers, it is no wonder that Engineers are a bit warped too. I have friends who think I wear a white lab coat and work in a lab – possibly with chemicals, rubber gloves and a wild-haired inventor type. (I design electronic hardware via CAD in my cube. We do have a lab, but no lab coats.)
I’ve met one MSEE who believed in Bigfoot, conspiracy theories, and everything UFO. Another with a BS in comp sci was sure he found an ‘error’ in thermodynamics that could be exploited for free energy. One of my engineering friends got his civil engineering degree in Europe, and his Masters in computer science here in the states – usually a level-headed guy, but he absolutely believes that at least some crop circles could not have been created by humans.
It’s enough to make me weep sometimes.
Gah! I’ve just been driven blind by stupidity.
(…at least I can’t read the poll comments any more.)
Holy crumbling…! ACK!
Help me.
I’m having a Kornbluth moment.
I don’t want to believe in the marching morons. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.
Please. Help me.
To anyone just joining this thread, don’t click on the link. Just don’t. It will only make things worse.
“jll1920: Evolution would require that the same bacteria would change its own cells and become something more complex, say a lizard.”
Or say, a peacock. Hey, why not a whale with a monkey tail. What were we talking about again? Ah right, praise jesus!
Maybe you should start stressing that doing your own “research” is not for everyone.
I wonder how some of these people would respond if it was pointed out to them that even if the theory of evolution is totally wrong it doesn’t automatically follow that their version of creation is correct.
See, this is why I don’t subscribe to the newspaper. Why don’t they ask questions like:
Do you believe that some species of mammalia coexisted with the dinosaurs and survived the dinosaur extinction, and eventually evolved into the different species we see now?
Do you believe that the human species will soon make the earth uninhabitable for all life forms, or do you think that even if humans turn out to be an evolutionary dead end, other forms of life will adapt and survive on the planet?
Do you believe that intelligent forms of life exist on the planet Earth?
I agree with an above poster (forgot your handle but you know who you are anyway), engineers frequently espouse stupid opinions on evolution because they are like any other non-biologist. They approach the subject as a layman. The problem is that their egos are inflated beyond proportion by cultural prejudices toward science, which leads many of them to the erroneous that their ignorant opinions are worth the bandwidth they take up in comment threads.
I do, however, take issue with the idea that engineers (and medical professionals, if you wish to include them) adpot these opinions because their thinking is inherently unscientific. A lot of engineering and medicine is very research intensive and does force it’s practioners to think like scientists. Certainly, that’s not always the case. But I also think it’s erroneous to suggest that there is some hard epistemological divide, outside of simple subject specialization, that makes engineering inferior to scientific thinking.
Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”
Well, I’m afraid I’m a member of the ignorant minority. Clearly the answer is ‘Yes”. I know of no law of nature that renders it impossible for dinosaurs to have existed alongside early humans. They just didn’t, as a matter of fact. (Seriously, when a question is so badly posed we shouldn’t assume anything about those who answer it one way or another).
Please…someone tell me this is straight from “The Onion.”
If you ever want to be entertained by drivil, replace “believe” with “strong evidence”…
If you have strong evidence Jesus existed, and you have strong evidence he said what he said, then you have strong evidence for Job, Noah, Adam and Eve, Jonah and the whale, Moses and other historical, biblical figures are real people and the ‘stories’ are real because…
I know of no law of nature that renders it impossible for dinosaurs to have existed alongside early humans. They just didn’t, as a matter of fact. (Seriously, when a question is so badly posed we shouldn’t assume anything about those who answer it one way or another).
Yep, and even if dinosaurs didn’t exist alongside early humans, it is possible to make it so that they did by praying for it to happen. And even if there were a law of nature that renders it impossible… well you get the picture. Everything is possible to make happen merely by wishing it to be “poofed”. This is one of the basic tenets of the belief systems of about, oh, six billion people or so.
My father is a famous engineer. But he does not understand the subtlety of evolution one bit. He once asked me, “But how do the animals KNOW how to change?” Engineers often think like glorified auto-mechanics, with everything in its place, everything with a function, neatly categorized and designed. Engineering almost guarantees creationist thinking, with all do respect to the enlightened engineers out there.
Damn…how ironic that I have no god to save me from the religious idiots. Maybe I would be happier if I were a fundie nut too.
The general public has such a warped idea of Engineers, it is no wonder that Engineers are a bit warped too. I have friends who think I wear a white lab coat and work in a lab – possibly with chemicals, rubber gloves and a wild-haired inventor type. (I design electronic hardware via CAD in my cube. We do have a lab, but no lab coats.)
Heh. I tell people I’m a librarian, they immediately think I shelve books and shush people. Nope – I sit at a computer and catalogue/index/classify, when I’m not in meetings, training, or doing a myriad other things.
Of course their poll has a lower percentage of creationists than the general population. Parade requires you to read.
HA!
I’m a computer scientist…. but people hear computer and want me to fix their windows problem….
I’m also a consultant – so people assume I’m an ass with opinions and no actual skills/knowledge.
I’m also in senior management – so people think i spend all day in meetings simply telling juniors what to do and drinking coffee… (OK the last one is pretty close to the truth)
the point is – no one label defines everything we are… but it is sufficient to define some aspect of what we are.
And people who *read* parade (as opposed to simply using it as eye-candy-words-in-a-line-when-it-gets-in-my-line-of-sight) are simply delusional whack jobs!
MarcusA,
You’d think that engineers would have enough exposure to probability and statistics to have more than a layman’s insight into how evolution works. Lots of stuff “just happens” according to stochastic patterns, from crystal structure in metals to shot noise in a resistor, with useful (or at least understandable) aggregate behavior. But, yeah, compartmentalization is such a strong habit of mind for many engineers that such results are waved away with the notion that, to a sufficiently intelligent and knowledgeable engineer, probability doesn’t exist — there is a reason, a cause, for everything. The very mechanism of evolution is anathema, with its reliance on accidental events and selection.
Henry Morris hydraulics.
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
I found the poll question very misleading… dinosoars could have existed alongside early humans. It’s just that all the evidence suggests that they didn’t.
damn… must use preview…
^oar^aur
Creationist: “I do believe in Noah, I do, I do. I do believe in Noah, I do, I do!” repeat ad nauseam.
This engineer thing really doesn’t surprise me. When I was college in the early 70s, everyone was required to take two years of English (1 of comp and 1 of lit) and several humanities courses, regardless of major. This, however, did not apply to engineering students – they were required to have only 1 yr of English and as far as I can remember pretty much zilch for the liberal arts. As a technical writer, I can attest to the fact that a great many of them haven’t a clue to the mechanics of writing a simple sentence. It’s as if a lot of them are savants.
Of course humans coexisted with dinosaurs – we currently are.
Except now they’re called birds.
I think the engineer thing is much more than just being biology laymen. It’s been stated around here before, but it really seems more linked to authoritarianism. Analogy alert! Take two 2nd graders, both very bright, love math and science. One is from a very religious family (therefore authoritarian in thinking), one is from a more secular family. Which will end up an engineer, which a scientist? And engineering training just cements the authoritarian thinking, because it is applications of science. Science (the part you use, and engineers don’t use evolution much) becomes the authority.
And try saying you’re a linguist. People start saying “Oh! I better watch my grammar!” Using my job title doesn’t help much (Director of Categorization).
Gah, started to write an analogy, then changed to something more direct. Didn’t remove my analogy alert.
Hmph. Had to wait to post my correction of myself.
I’m surprised no one commented on this great line:
I understand fossils being that old … but do you really think bones could last that long?
So 65-MYO fossils are cool. But no bones. Nope.
Another thing that’s scary is that about every other post that mentions scripture gets it really, really wrong. The damnable fools don’t know what it is they think they’re defending.
I live in Texas… I’m an Engineer… and I’m Atheist… apparently I’m the only one of those… Atheist Texas Engineer. It’s lonely sometimes…
P.Z., y’know, Parade used to have Carl Sagan on retainer as “chief science correspondent” or “staff astronomer,” or something like that.
Have your agent call and pitch putting you on the masthead, and have you do a column a couple times a year.
No agent? Call ’em.
I’m serious, dammit. Call them. With luck, they’ll agree, and they will stop being stupid for a long time. The worst that could happen: They’d fail to hire you.
Call ’em.
haha
Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?
ANSWERS % OF VOTE
Yes 33%
No 67%
Results based on a total of 6666 responses
6666 responses , awesome….
Stop with the engineer bashing, people. Yes, some of us don’t use the scientific method. Yes, some of us are morons about biology. That does not mean you get to tar all of us with your brush.
I, for one, am a researcher studying circuit design. Design does not require me to use the scientific method on a normal basis, but it does come up. Some of my colleagues do research on testing, which can and often does require the scientific method.
Your average B.S. in engineering doesn’t get much background in bio. But then, your average B.S. in bio doesn’t get much exposure to physics. We all have our weak spots, and it’s up to the knowledgeable ones among us to help fix that.
if i believe the days are 24 hours long(which i acutally think they are just a bit shorter than that, hence leap year), then that means i must accept the bible as truth….
wait, WHAT?
Okay, broken record here (since I’ve said this before), but as someone who used to design complex things (steam turbines) all day, the process bore much more resemblance to evolution than to creationism (trial and error, lucky accidents, incremental changes to previous designs, survival in a competitive marketplace). We did some of our “natural selection” on models and prototypes, but a lot happened “in the field” also. I remember a couple of us joking once about how the Great Designer in the Sky had screwed up by producing sickle-cell anemia as part of his fix for the malaria bug – similar things often happened with our own first round of fixes to turbine problems.
I have met some engineers who might not be able to grasp the concept of evolution, but they didn’t work on complex design problems – or not for long. Some were basically mechanics, who wound up in factory support or field service, which is useful work but relies more on mechanical intuition than modeling ability.
OK, I’m going to be a bit of a dick and ask the scientists here in the comments if they have any actual evidence that a majority, or even a substantial minority, of engineers are creationists. Is it possible that we take special notice when self-proclaimed engineers espouse creationist nonsense because we expect them to know better?
If there are surveys that show the percentage of creationist engineers, I’d like to see it. I’m sure I’d be disappointed in the figure, but I’m holding out hope that the number would be distinctly less than the general population.
Yes we expect engineers to know better. We also expect doctors, dentists, biologists, geneticists, mathematicians, computer scientists, college and high school graduates to know better. Unfortuantely some of these are more frequently vocal about their abiltiy to ignore good science and their supposed good education.
I really wonder how this copper-jacketed 9mm slug would taste.
I just posted this on the other site…
I think the real question is “how do we know what to believe?” If I accept virgins births, talking donkeys, living in whales, global floods, demon possessions, money in fish, existence of unicorns, the firmament, a flat Earth or any other claim made in the Bible then by what basis do we have to reject astrology, faith healings, tarot cards, ghosts, leprechauns, Big Foot, alien abduction and so on? Where do we separate allegory, metaphor, allusion, and fiction from fact? The story of Noah is a myth, like the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh before it. Science has bore this out repeatedly. Science is the method by which we can answer the legitimacy of the existence or non-existence of Noah, the Flood, and the dating of dinosaurs and early plant and animal life on the planet.
When a Creationist claims that the Earth is only 4,000 to 6,000 years old, they are using the “who begat who” dating method. Is that scientific? We deserve better than to age our planet and by extension the solar system and the universe on the mating habits of ancient peoples.
Having just scored 45 on the Asperger’s Test, I guess I’m now allowed to rant at these morons:
Different strokes, JP. I, for one, like to bash creationist mathematicians precisely because I expect better from those doing what I aspire to do. Did somebody say Granville Sewell? No? Well, check out the foolishness anyway, if you haven’t yet.
Particularly amusing is his claim that producing encyclopedias and computers violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As he says, that “point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically oriented people” who don’t understand science and would rather imply that the foundations of thermodynamics have been thoroughly falsified by routine acts than actually learn the science.
(In all honesty, I’m engaging in a slight quote-mine here, as I’m focusing on what I find most ridiculous in his argument rather than the overall thrust. As far as I can tell, though, that part is just as utterly wrong as I think it is and the whole thing betrays a failure to comprehend thermodynamics.)
Sure, university instructors principally pass on ideas from narrowly defined specialties, but it would be nice if they might inspire students to learn and to think. Universities and academics love to pay lip service to critical thinking, whether they do much about it or not. I don’t mind pointing out that Sewell sets an embarrassing example.
I’ve mentioned before, on this blog & elsewhere, that I dropped out of university (college)…
I was a very aspiring computer scientist…. but I was a shit-poor scholar. I could do everything ‘in class’ and do *anything* when I had access to reference books, and my projects were huge and immensely challenging… butg I could never fully master subjects requiring mere scholarship (number theory – why so many axioms; calculus – great & works really well operationally, but why do I need to KNOW the fucking standrd integrals!!!! they’re in a book, already)
My university had no credits for class work, and 100% credits for competitive exams – i.e. tuned for scholars.
I dropped out because I couldn’t handle delivering successful seminars to my ‘seniors’ in ‘Data structures & algorithms’ while simultaneously failing calculus!
sorry – you might be interested in a *point* for the above…
*just because someone has a degree doesn’t mean (s)he can think*
and
*just because someone doesn’t have a degree doesn’t mean (s)he can’t think*
tony,
abso-bloody-lutely to your #71
There is a real scandal being covered up in the creo community.
We know now that at least 99% of all terrestrial life is extinct, dinosaurs, synapsids, giant dragonflies and millipedes, permian reptiles, pleistocene mammals, SA terror birds, etc..
According to them, all these animals were on the Big Boat. They got off the boat. Then they died out. All 4,000 years ago. A 99% failure rate is a disaster in anyone’s book.
There is a big oooppppsy here. We miss our dinosaurs! I blame it on poor Iraqi class post deluge planning. Somebody dropped the ball big time.
This has been covered up for 4,000 years. What happened and when did they know it?
Raven – you’re absolutely right.
It’s time we all stood up to these immoral extinctionary(?) people and told it like it is….
I bet these are the same people responsible for global warming, and causing the death of all these current species!
IT’S STILL HAPPENING!
@fupDuck (#53):
yeah, this annoys me too. what annoys me even more is that these idiots are right for the wrong reasons. and the smart people are standing there going “hahah look at how dumb these people are” when they’re actually wrong themselves on a technicality.
birds are dinosaurs.
birds are not extinct.
ergo, dinosaurs are not extinct.
#57 I call bullshit. I get tired of this lame ass backhand about the fundie bible reading. There take is as good as your take they just refuse to bend a belief to reality and that makes them clueless.
Others who pretend to ‘know’ that the cave dwelling goatherder really meant this profound thing that was evolution 1000’s of years before Darwin brought it together are simply seeing what you want to see.
wrg:
There’s nothing wrong with bashing the creationists in engineering. They’re an example of that piss-poor teaching of critical thinking you mention. My point was simply to not overgeneralize about engineers.
I find that engineering instruction is pretty authoritarian, as mentioned above. However, the professors aren’t the authoritarians, it’s the students who don’t care about understanding the why behind the engineering. Most profs know and are happy to explain the science behind engineering. Most students just take equations on faith.
Also, professors talk a great deal about theory and design, but not as much about debugging designs. Debugging, or in its more general form, engineering forensics, is heavily rooted in the scientific method and critical thinking. Why did ____ break? What are the possible culprits? How can I determine the root cause?
Too often students are left on their own when attempting to debug their work. Even if the tools of debugging are taught, rarely do students learn how to think about it. This needs to be remedied.
In response to #75:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t dinosaurs evolve into birds. By our definition of “bird”, dinosaurs are not included.
I mean, if we are going to say that when species A evolves into species B, that species B is still species A, we are effectively saying Humans are single-celled organisms, aren’t we?
Sorry if I’m incorrect, I’ve only had a single semester of biology and I’ve forgotten all the technical terms that I should be using here, but its hard to keep that stuff in your head if you aren’t using it daily.
Calladus:
“I’ve met one MSEE who believed in Bigfoot, conspiracy theories, and everything UFO.”
Was that Joe Thor, perchance?
See ya tomorrow night, BTW.
Scott
#64…I’m not sure anyone is saying that engineers are hugely likely to be creationists. As a subset of scientists, though, they’re much more likely to be creationists. What’s more, there are certainly far more engineers than biochemists or paleontologists. Thus when Hovind or Ham needs a “scientist”, it’s no surprise to see an engineer or mathematician get trotted out.
As a footnote to my comment of authoritarian engineers being created in religious families, I speak somewhat from personal experience. I have three brothers who are engineers, one of them a creationist. The other two figured it out. That’s about the same rate my engineer friends and I figured in college. I only knew one or two godly linguists, though, but that could just be because the atheist ones were a lot more fun.
#78,
They’re both, birds and dinosaurs. Just as we are humans, and apes. A life form doesn’t stop being one just because it evolved into another. Which means, according to discoveries recently made regarding a certain cnidarian worm, that you are a slime mold.
#79,
Just because somebody believes in creationism and soil depletion doesn’t mean he’s wrong about soil depletion.
PARADE is that syndicated Sunday supplement whose front-page story can usually be summed up thusly: “Celebrity du jour confesses: ‘I was a cokehead in a downward spiral until I was redeemed by reproducing my DNA and then life became a joyous miracle”… that’s the level we’re dealing with here.
As for engineers as creationists: I think that’s a case of projection.
Perhaps next, PARADE can delve more into the subject of artistry and ignorant opinions by asking its readers whether they believe Allah turned this woman into a beast.
(Actually, I was just looking for an opportunity to post something about Patricia Piccinin here…)
I think another explanation may be overlooked, i.e., people are unlikely to falsely represent themselves as a particular scientist (biologist, chemist, et al), as simple questions can out them, but the blanket term “engineer” is suitibly vague to hide their chicanery.
I suspect that several of the self-described engineers in these, and other related surveys, are liars. I also do not find it to be a great stretch to imagine that they have been informed that, if misrepresenting credentials, claiming to be an engineer is easier to fudge.
The ID crowd is a den of dishonest worms (my apologies to worms and ordinary liars) who have demonstrated repeatedly that truth has no place in their disturbed little crania.
Robert #36, those are excellent questions which ‘most everybody would benefit from pondering (even those who already know the answers)
Sorry, JP, but I’ll bet my IEEE membership that a higher percentage of engineers are creationists than nearly any other group with a similar level of education, with the exception being perhaps theology. It’s wrong to stereotype, though, and I have to admit that the younger engineers I’ve met are a bit more well-rounded on average. An encouraging trend, but still not a dominant one.
Steve_C @ #10
“Aren’t engineers alot like dentists?” Nahhhhh!
Engineers are a bit like accountants – good with figures, but without the personality.
Re #11: I suspect the reason we hear so much about creationist engineers are two-fold. The first is that engineers have some of the “smart technical guy” mystique that scientists have in the popular view (which, yes, usually does imagine both as guys) and thus are easy enough for the general public to conflate with people who know something about science, so creationist engineers, who seem to be more numerous than creationist scientists, can be deployed as illusionary buttresses for the creationists’ case. The reason they’re more numerous, I suspect, is that despite being highly technical engineers aren’t required to think like scientists, and are likely to be somewhat biased towards thinking of complex things in terms of design since that’s what they do all day.
As an engineer with a Ph.D. in Math, I think these are extremely good insights.
My job requires Mathematical reasoning skills but not scientific reasoning skills, and while they’re related, they not quite the same. Additionally, it’s true that an engineer designs complex things all day and is surrounded by others doing the same, so it’s very easy to be taken in by the watchmaker analogy.
That said, most of the engineers I’ve worked with have a healthy respect for science and have a grasp of how to tell the difference between someone who is qualified to pronounce on a subject and someone who isn’t. If you’ve advanced far enough along in your education to understand what the term “peer-reviewed research” means (as many engineers have) then you’re unlikely to fall for the Creationists’ claims of a controversy over evolution within the scientific community. But you don’t hear as much about tech people who know a thing or two about science since that’s the expected case…
I’m an engineer in the UK and was just wondering if the term was protected from misuse in the states as it isn’t over here. Window fitters can be optical aperture engineers if that how they want to designate themselves. There are old jokes about what kind of engineer god was that conclude he must be a civil engineer as no one else would run a waste pipe through a recreational area. Most of the design engineers I know when looking at the human body only conclude “I wouldn’t have done it like that” its almost as if every part of the body used to be something else and has been bodged about with to perform a different function, most of nature when looked at from an engineering point of view works but in an odd and flawed way, if there is a designer god then he/she will be the type that thinks computer case modding using pumpkins is cool and is therefore best avoided.
Uber #76– If you don’t like Ed Darrell’s criticism of the fundamentalists’ bible reading, why don’t you tell us which verse of Genesis actually mentions the ’24-hour days’ the fundies keep ranting about? Because what it actually says in my bible doesn’t indicate the original scribes had the concept of hours at all. And it sounds an awful lot like they thought the earth was flat. So I get the suspicion, every time I hear fundamentalists say ’24 hour days,’ that they haven’t really studied the bible at all. They’re just parroting what some preacher told them was in it.
Well I DO think that this is evidence that it is usually made insufficeintly clear in school that dinosaur fossils ARE NOT BONE.
#89: The Panda’s Thumb could have been subtitled “Kludges in Nature”, if Gould had only known what a kludge was.
Unfortunately, since designed objects are also often full of kludges, this doesn’t really rule out design – it just means that if there was design, it was done progressively and somewhat lazily, making minor tweaks to existing designs whenever possible, and never starting over from scratch. (Starting over from scratch it would be obvious that you don’t put the retina in backwards, cross the air and food pipes, just add another finger if you need one, and all the other kludges in the “designs” of complex organisms.)
So it only rules out *certain kinds* of designers – which happen to be the kinds most creationists believe in, but they’ll be happy to equivocate and take refuge behind the nebulous limited, mistake-prone designers.
I’m in the unique position to know a chemical engineer who is now getting a phD in genetics (evolutionary functional genomics). According to him, engineering and physics are the only true sciences…all that genetics stuff is too open-ended. In other words, it’s too messy for a schematic. Of course, that’s a little facetious but the sentiment is there.
Oh, and now the Cre’ti’n Museum has moved to TV ads. I was quite excited to catch an ad on a local Indianapolis station because it had art that looked much like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”, a book I like to give to expecting parents. I was expecting a new book by the author, or perhaps a children’s video of some sort. Turned out the graphics were the ad backdrop for that bloody place within a day’s drive of . . . how many people was it supposed to be? Yikes!
#38
Yes I noticed the peculiar “could have” as well. What is obviously missing then is the “if” that should follow.
Thought Provoker (aka Quantum Quack)#6:
Indeed, disturbingly, I have found many similar examples amongst aerospace engineers. I cannot understand WHY such a large proportion of them are so ignorant and downright backward when it comes to the most elemenary aspects of science.
These folks are supposed to be working with the natural physical aspects of materials. Competent engineering requires at least a BASIC knowledge of the actual physics involved. Its as if many of them are perfectly content to remain ignorant of anything even immediately outside their particular specialty. But the worst cases I’ve encountered behave as if what they do is more of a magical art of some kind that cannot be acquired except by the doing…as if they are any good at the doing. VERY strange!
I have noted that the increasing tendency towards the magician attitude seems to correlate quite strongly with the fact that a space agency, which once put a man on the moon FROM ABSOLUTE SCRATCH (nobody having so much as orbited ANYTHING before 1957, let alone a living being) in a mere dozen years…has trouble – nearly FOUR DECADES LATER – figuring out how to develop over a longer period of time than was originally required, a decent and safe machine that does the same thing. It should be EASIER and LESS EXPENSIVE to do now, NOT harder and more expensive!!! In that same time a considerably less knowledgeable industry progressed from the Wright brother’s short hop to aircaft that could regularly transport dozens of passengers to any point on the globe.
Its as if they have completely forsaken the old engineer’s primary “KISS” adage: KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. There’s lots to recommend it, for the sake of the very reliability and safety everyone endlessly wrings their hands over.
C.L.Hanson says, “That said, most of the engineers I’ve worked with have a healthy respect for science and have a grasp of how to tell the difference between someone who is qualified to pronounce on a subject and someone who isn’t.”
Yes, agreed. “Most”.
Arden #56 wrote I’m surprised no one commented on this great line: *I understand fossils being that old … but do you really think bones could last that long?* So 65-MYO fossils are cool. But no bones. Nope
And Jim #91 wrote: Well I DO think that this is evidence that it is usually made insufficiently clear in school that dinosaur fossils ARE NOT BONE.
Whereas we refer to dinosaur remains as fossils, to say that they aren’t bone can be a bit of a misnomer. It begs the question of how much permineralization defines the line between bone and *fossil.* I’m almost certain a cutoff hasn’t been established (I certainly haven’t seen anything in the taphonomic literature proposing one) and thus I don’t think vertebrate permineralization is a process we can describe using a 0 or 1 characterization (where 0 is bone and 1 is fossil). Unless I missed it (always possible), I don’t think there is an on/off switch for where a bone ceases to be a bone and becomes a fossil due to some predefined degree of permineralization.
The process of vertebrate permineralization is a continuum and is not directly related to the age of the element (e.g., coracoid, ulna) in question. Numerous factors of depositional environment/pre-internment taphonomy and post-internment taphonomy come into play, and most of these processes remain very poorly understood in all but semi-arid depositional settings. To point at a sauropod toe and make an a priori declarative statement that, because it was part of a non-avian dinosaur and is millions of years old, the organic fraction of the bone has obviously been completely removed and replaced by minerals from groundwater and that *this* is what designates said element as a fossil is inaccurate. A lot of work would have to be done to make that sort of statement defensible. I for one would hate being tasked with trying to take a 30 million year old bird femur and figure out what percentage of the original organic fraction had been removed and how much the resulting pore-space had been subsequently in-filled, just so we would know whether the label was to be bone or fossil. Sure, it is essentially the Geo100 answer, but like so much in earth science, the Geo100 answer here is oversimplified to the point where it doesn’t apply to much in the real world. I know why they do it in schools and I wouldn’t advocate jumping into taphonomy with both feet anywhere before an advanced undergraduate class, but it appears to result in almost as many pro-evolution folks as pro-creation types misunderstanding the process. Splitting hairs? Perhaps, but it is just this sort of thing that the Hovinds of the world exploit very effectively to try and make us look foolish…or dishonest. In practice, I like to classify all remains of ancient vertebrates as fossils…heck I wouldn’t make too much of a fuss if someone referred to 60 year old exhumed carcass as a fossil. Doing so doesn’t seem to be far off from my (probably poor) interpretations of the original motive of the word.
Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, “Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”
Shouldn’t it be “a pol who asks”?
Those politicians are always pandering to someone.
Yes, I believe some dinosaurs could have coexisted with humans, if only they were alive at the same time. However, since they all went extinct well before humans appeared, we’ll never know for sure. Unless we count birds.
This always strikes me as a non-winnable position for a creo to take. I remember it being used extensively a few years back when Kansas was first debating the inclusion of evolution in science standards.
My response would be…”Did any Xian observe, verify, or perform an experiment that indicates that god created the universe in 6 days, or that there even was a Noah and a great flood?”
No one alive today saw Christ resurrected, yet we are supposed to accept unconditionally that he did, in the absence of logic and reason and evidence, yet dismiss evolution and a billions of years old earth, despite the presence of logic, reason, and evidence.
MikeM said:
A good illustration of the difference was NG’s article about evolution a couple years back, where the title read “Was Darwin Wrong?”, and the answer, when you turned the page, was a simple “No.” in big letters, followed by a very intelligent layperson-level article about the origin of the theory.
Re. NASA & Apollo:
Actually, as I understand it, the thing holding NASA back on developing the new capsule system is mainly that it’s an unfunded mandate. NASA’s been instructed to develop this new system, but been given no funding to help to it. That means the money to develop the capsule has to come out of NASA’s existing budget, which means cuts. Lots of cuts–OR super-slow progress.
arachnophilia #75
You missed my point. I am a militant anti-creationist atheist. I wasn’t saying dinosaurs aren’t extinct.
My point was that birds, being (apparently) descended from dinosaurs, (from what I’ve read; I’m a computer systems designer with an interest in biology) are proof of evolution. The lineage continues, but the descendents look little like their ancestors.
Oh well, I tried.
That’s a howler…
“Why yes, the bones that didn’t fossilize did all decompose. Where do you think fossils came from, if not bones?
“(Oh that’s right, God put them there; they’re not bones, they’re not made from bones, they’re just shaped like bones in order to trick us. I don’t know about you, but in Church I was never taught to believe that God was a deceiver.)”
That one reminds me of when I was a child and was told that meat came from the muscles of animals–at first I didn’t believe it, because I had thought that there was a special part of the animal that was “meat”, separate from the muscle. Is that the level of maturity we’re facing here?
Like autumn #84, I suspect dishonesty in such “Comments” surveys, as well as on the Internet. What are the negative consequences of lying about a degree or education in such circumstances? Few to none, from the liar’s perspective. The perceived benefits include gaining credibility, presenting a grandiose image, persisting with delusions about one’s achievements, etc. “Well, I read lots of Wikipedia articles, and I took a course or two at one time, and I watched several PBS programs on the subject, so really, I *should* have an MS or PhD.”
Real academicians with real degrees are very easy to check on these days. I don’t think it would take any great computer proficiency to find out my real name, for example, and check my credentials. From there, it’s a cinch to find webpages, lists of publications, meeting abstracts, grant awards, etc. Can’t check my transcripts, but the college accreditation board certainly can (and does).
The self-appointed experts and self-awarded degree holders are annoying and a bit creepy, but there’s no way to stop them from their self-promotional exercises in surveys, message boards, blogs, etc.
so you just wrecked up a nice summer night for this math teacher. damn depressing. i think i’m better off not knowing what americans think.
Did any scientist observe,verify or perform an experiment that indicates that dinosaurs were extinct 64 million years before man appeared or that Noah had trouble finding a pair of dinosaurs? Those who make these statements are outside the realm of science.
Noah only needed 1 pair of dinosaurs? Which species did he choose to save?
An engineer and a mathematician. Again with these engineers giving their profession a bad name.
There are A LOT of engineers out there, so it’s easier to find creationist nut jobs among their ranks. But on a percentage basis, most of the engineers and comp-sci people are swayed by scientific evidence. In my professional life, surrounded by engineers and comp-sci’s, I’ve met lots of atheists and agnostics, but only two creationists — one of which got fired for not being able to write logical code (don’t know what happened to the other one).
As a biologist with over a decade and a half of research experience, I’d like to point out an overall failing of scientific rigor in this argument: there is no evidence for evolution. You all seem to be aware of the lack of scientific evidence for the extreme creationist hypothesis so I don’t need to go into that. There is plenty of evidence for natural selection, but that in it self does not support any argument regarding the origin of species.
Science relies heavily on written documentation, and as such the Bible has never been scientifically disproven despite multiple attempts. But even for those who believe literally in the Bible there is no manifest record for what went onto Noah’s ark and therefore there is not even Biblical evidence for dinosaurs being on the ark.
So what would you accept as evidence for evolution?
Evidence for evolution would be proof that one species became two species. Relatedness of species is not proof of that, in the same way that the relatedness of a bicycle tire and a car tire is actually the work of designers reusing templates.
To say that Mastodons, Asian Elephants, and African Elephants are related is true. To say that one became another, or that they all came from a common (unobserved) ancestor is unsupported scientifically. To say that one is extinct and the other two aren’t is a display of natural selection.
SO how do you *explain* the experiments that demonstrated speciation in drosophilia (fruit flies)… was that a hoax? or was that demonstrable evidence?
I’m sure this was posted here before…. I’ll have a look.
Then we’re done. Speciation has been observed numerous times, both in nature and in the lab. Or did you have a non-standard definition of ‘species’ in mind?
here you go.
More detail here
“Scientist” wrote:
“To say that one became another, or that they all came from a common (unobserved) ancestor is unsupported scientifically.”
Consider an analogy: linguists know that there is strong (overwhelming) evidence that French is more closely related to Spanish than either is to English. But how could they know this? Easy: look at the “traits” – Spanish and French have a large number of otherwise arbitrary similarities, and so we infer that they’re more closely related to one another than either is to English.
I assume you accept the logic of this argument in historical linguistics, even though no one alive now was around when these languages were evolving from their common ancestors?
This is just an analogy – but I hope (for your sake) you at least agree that we can get evidence for unobserved common causes from what we can observe in the present.
Now go read talk origins or learn some biology before making ridiculous claims about inferences to common ancestry not being supported scientifically.
MartinM and tony, you are right about that. Forgive me for using the term species, when I was thinking genus.
When we have made over a million mutations to mice through breedings, individual mutations, knock-ins, knock-outs, duplications, adding genes from other species, et cetera, why is it that we still just get mice?
To say that Mastodons, Asian Elephants, and African Elephants are related is true. To say that one became another, or that they all came from a common (unobserved) ancestor is unsupported scientifically.
Then how do you suppose they are related? By marriage?
What’s a genus? Given the numerous issues we have just with the species concept, even if we produce a new genus…how will you know? Who decides it is a new genus?
There’s a big difference between “there is no evidence for evolution” and “I am unaware of the evidence for evolution as provided by research that others have accomplished and published”.
Unless, of course, you failed to give up egocentric thinking during childhood.
I don’t think it would be right to characterize Parade magazine as an honest cross-section of America. Parade magazine intentionally tries to present an Ozzie and Harriet sort of view. Good Americans go to church every Sunday, say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, never divorce and have 2.3 children. It always struck me as a bit like reading the Mayberry Gazette.
So, this type of article is right up their alley.
Scientist,
You said, “the Bible has never been scientifically disproved despite multiple attempts.”
Ya, right. Pi = 3, the earth is flat, the plants of the earth were created before the sun was, (makes it hard for photosynthesis to work, huh), a women is impregnated without relations with a man, to name a few.
Really, it takes only one error to disprove the scientific accuracy of the Bible. However, I could add to the above list.
You’re best bet as a Christian who wants to maintain his/her beliefs is isolate yourself from available counter information. But, if you choose to exchange ideas on this forum please share proof instead of easily refutable claims that you could have known to be false if you had only read a book or two.
Others have easily refuted your evolutionary misinformation, but I thought that the biblical aspect of your nonsensical comments should be refuted as well.
Scientist, are you sure mice are all one genus? Can anybody tell me if that’s right? It sounds suspicious to me. I suppose you could move the argument back one step–“Well, yeah, evolution works within varities and within species and within genuses, but when you get families, THEN it all falls apart.” But the retreat doesn’t look good for the creationist side. In Darwin’s day, species were defined as unvarying.
(BTW, did everybody read Josh’s post #98 on the continuum between bones and fossils? Neat stuff.)
Mice are grouped in the genus Mus, but remember that we don’t have a hard-and-fast rule for groupings above the species level. “Shrew”, for instance, refers to over three hundred species spread across 26 genera (my counts are from Wikipedia, here). Hamsters are a subfamily, Cricetinae; gerbils are a subfamily, Gerbillinae. Fruit bats are an entire suborder, Megachiroptera, spread across 42 genera.
At anything above the species level, you’re really just dealing with a naming convention. For creationists to claim that the edge of evolution happens to correspond exactly with this week’s naming convention by those darn godless biologists strains credibility.