It’s on the internets. The opening is something that I can’t imagine flying by on American television: he simply says that evolution is a vastly superior explanation to anything religion has ever provided.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Can’t wait to watch this! That is a very bold statement, indeed. But damn true. It’s very sad that something so honest is so taboo in your country and would stop such a gem from making it to broadcast.
How Great is Dawkins! I have to hurry home to I can get this on the laptop and out to the TV stat!
I think this could be shown in the US but I live in NY it can be very different here than in the midwest, but any in NYC should check out the hall of Human Evolution at the American Natural History Museum
I think I’m going to watch this after “So You Think You Can Dance” tonight.
And tomorrow I’m finding a place without wireless access so I can actually get some writing done…unlike today.
Good stuff.
Good points:
1. Dawkins pointing to the superiority of evolutionary theory compared to any other explanation for the diversity of earth.
2. A very good explanation on how Darwin came to his theory.
3. A good, short and to-the-point explanation of how the theory works. Now he can really focus 2 episodes on other (e.g. social) issues.
4. Lots of nice eyecandy, and I defo dig the music.
5. His point to start with education, and do this as good as possible.
Lesser points:
1. Dawkins in front of a group of 16 year olds. It just… somehow doesn’t work. He seems a bit dispassionate when the boy finds an ammonite, for example.
All in all a lovely first episode though. I am really looking forward to how Dawkins will handle social darwinism etc as the episode 2 teaser promises.
Thethyme (#2):
I was actually in that Human Evolution hall just the other weekend. Most of it was fantastic, but they did waste a TV screen on a video of Francis “tripartite waterfall” Collins. Even a reconstruction of the Laetoli footprints has more “spiritual” weight than that.
Sure, but science gives better explanations about everything, including everyday behaviors–something that religions think is their specialty.
I would rather that evolution be contextualized in science when statements like his are made. Evolution isn’t unique in making religion superfluous as explanation–an important fact in telling people about evolution–it’s just the last broad section of human observation to submit to physical explanation.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I think I’m going to watch this after “So You Think You Can Dance” tonight.
It’s the finale! I’ll be watching. I wish there were somewhere that had SYTYCD nights…
it was a great show and there are two more parts playing on the 11th and the 18th, you can get it from the channel 4 website after its played
With regard to the recent PZ Myers interview – the interviewer had PZ at his disposal but just couldn’t bring himself to ask the tough questions required of the situation. The Eucharist, and its desecration, was only mentioned on one occasion and the issue was summarily brushed under the rug.
This is particularly important given that if the issue had been delved into with sufficient detail the listeners would have had a better grasp of the type of character PZ is – especially when you have PZ presenting himself as the goody, goody tenured professor out to discover scientific truths as opposed to the neo/arch-Darwinist whose Machiavellian – “the ends justify the means” – approach to presenting *his* *personal* truths obscure his half-hearted protestations against framing (as seen in his unseemly spat with with Professor Nisbet). Misconceptions are perfectly acceptable provided they serve the purpose of progressing to the point where his, way, way left of field, Overton window becomes the focal point and his faith-based views are satisfied. In effect there can be no room for God – you can have your Dawkins, I’ll take my Einstein.
We see much of the same problem with Dawkins. I’ll leave it to someone far more eloquent than I, Deborah Orr, writing in The Independent:
In expressing the overwhelming nature of his admiration for Darwin and his genius in constructing his theory of evolution, Dawkins left the viewer with the impression that he had no reason to believe in God because Darwin was his prophet instead.
I personally find it disgraceful that unlike that farce of an interview where you at least have two separate views presented, this is being presented as a *factual* documentary on its on. How any school could knowingly allow Dawkins to have unfettered access to young minds is beyond me. But then a similar argument could be made against PZ Myers at UMM, as well it should.
____________________________________________________________
Dies Irae, Ben Stein, Dawkins
Woohoo, more rape fantasies and torture fetishism from the misogynist fuckwit who just cuts and pastes.
It’s worth considering how the Nice Hair crowd are going to respond to this, if they deign to notice it at all (last I checked, they completely ignored The Enemies of Reason). Maybe we could save them some time with a little game of Communication Experts Mad Libs:
“Richard Dawkins has once again proved himself the [RADIO TALK SHOW HOST] of science. Instead of deferring to the [SYNONYM FOR “FUZZY”] moderates or acknowledging the savvy of the [IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY] communication experts, he prefers to lend [TYPE OF AMMUNITION] to the creationist movement by exhibiting all the arrogance of [TELEVANGELIST]. He would Advance the Cause far better if he embraced proper framing techniques, as practiced by the campaign of [FAILED DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE].”
Fixed that for ya there, Petey!
As much as I dig Dawkins and find him a charismatic, eloquent voice, I really dislike his treatment of the kids in the classroom when he first encounters them. It’s obvious that they have no idea what evolution is, if they think it’s somehow of equal worth to religious superstitions. To object to their deeply held belief before even presenting the (unimpeachable) case for evolution is to put them on the defensive immediately, and to reduce the likelihood of their accepting the new idea. Makes for good shock TV, but doesn’t produce the sort of dialogue that can change someone’s mind.
Peter Rooke #9 wrote:
It was irrelevant. The subject of the Myers/Comfort debate was “Intelligent Design,” not “who has the better character.”
How any school could knowingly allow Dawkins to have unfettered access to young minds is beyond me.
yes, Pete, you’ve made it abundantly clear the many, many things that are beyond you.
that you don’t recognize this as a problem is humorous.
Your concerns are noted, and they are stupid.
I’ll take my Einstein. – Pete Rooke
Your Einstein? You mean the Einstein who explicitly repudiated the ideas of a personal god and an afterlife? How dare you, you loathsome little creep, with your disgusting rape and necrophilia fantasies?
NJ,
how else is Petey supposed to get sexual victims?
Those students sound just like mine.
I love Dawkins’ programs
Pete sure hates facts.
A cracker is just a cracker. Evolution is the ONLY explanation for the existence of life on this planet.
Reality is a bitch.
Hey petey, fuck you.
Oh how interesting Peter! (snickers)
You, know, you have a good point there! (chokes back a guffaw)
Yes Dawkins and PZ are evil, eeeeeeviiiiiillllll, I’ll tell you! (stifling laughter, tears streaming down cheeks).
By Jove, I think you are on to something, Peter! You are the voice of reason! I never realized how astute you are! Someone give this man a cookie!!!(laughs hysterically and falls down)
Someone give this man a cookie!!!
How about a cracker topped with cheeze whiz and a nail?
“Life, Darwin and Everything…”
ROFLMAO!!
The guy is a Douglas Adams fan forever.
Heck I can’t blame him. So am I!!
That’ll do.
I noticed nobody had yet pointed out the “Life, Darwin, and Everything” subtitle, so I thought I had an opportunity to be the first. Then my Internet connection was cut off and Luis beat me to it. Curse you, Verizon!
I like they way it has Dawkins engaging students. It’s a good thing for people in general to see, and it seems to me a promising rhetorical move: “People oppose evolution because they’re ignorant.”
I wish Dawkins wouldn’t misrepresent the history of geology in order to make his story simpler and more dramatic. You’d have to look very hard to find a reputable geologist in 1800 who was unaware of the great antiquity of the Earth. Then as now, biblical, young-earth geologists were cranks and recognized as such. Lots of geologists, especially English geologists, were Anglican clerics; but they one and all were careful to distinguish what we now call science from religion. Since the emergence of historical geology has now been exhaustively documented by Martin S. Rudwick in a wonderful series of books, there is no excuse for retailing the old warfare of science and theology bit. It’s hogwash.
We need to make Pete, Kenny and BaBa pinatas. Of course the downside is that when you bust them open, what comes out isn’t fit for consumption.
I found the documentary to be interesting and well done. I particularly liked how Dawkins showed that natural selection occurs in humans with the example of the prostitutes and HIV.
I’ve been watching it on YouTube.
Richard Dawkins said “It’s one reason I don’t believe in god.”
I’ve never heard anyone ever say that on television.
Evul Dawkins made the little children cry :P
Sure is heavy handed with the science vs. religion theme. I wouldn’t be opposed to that in general, but it doesn’t sit too well with me in the context of a piece specifically on Darwin and his genius. I think you can understand the profundity of his discovery perfectly well without bringing in the “religion is stupid” angle.
Seems a bit like Dawkins is struggling with the questions of the students, and he’s being a bit defensive. Well, I hope it gets better from here on.
Yeah, I can agree with that.
Nick #13:
Shame isn’t it. I just think it’s just a pity he didn’t get a chance to un-indoctrinate them sooner in life.
Wonderful. I wish it would show in America.
Unfortunately, Mr. Rooke keeps detailing (at length) the things that are beyond him – logic, reason, and honesty being three of them. No references to mini-skirts of human skin or rape fantasies, though, so I guess I should be grateful.
Outstanding video. My only gripe is the horrible music dubbed in. The story is so gripping, so powerful, so dramatic, only an insane music director could think there was a way he could help out.
It now occurs to me now that giraffes having long necks allowing them to feed higher up trees may not be the primary benefit. Where to post a sentry but up a tree? Well, the feeding giraffe is its own sentry, out in lion country. If predators cannot sneak up on you, you have an enormous advantage over rival prey species, and over shorter giraffes.
HIV resistance might not be a lucky break. It may be a retained trait from long ago when something similar lay waste to the vulnerable.
At the end, the girl said she still believes what the bible tells her, yet we know, truthfully, she has no idea what all is in her church’s version of the bible. That’s what’s so sad, blind submission to powerful authority.
Physicalist #32 wrote:
I don’t think the documentary is supposed to be a neutral science piece — it’s also dealing with science vs. religion. There have been other documentaries on evolution and Darwin which left out the atheism angle. The producers, or Dawkins, or both, obviously wanted to include it.
I suspect an evolution documentary hosted by Ken Miller or Francis Collins would be certain to include sections on how it harmonizes with religious views. That’s one of their special themes, just as the opposite tack is Dawkins’.
It makes more sense I think to criticize it as Jim Harrison is doing — or as we do with theistic evolution — on points, rather than on content per se.
Perhaps Pete could enlighten us about the Canadian bus riding decapitator who evidently consumed parts of his victim before the police nabbed him, although, evidently, there wasn’t enough time for him to make a miniskirt or a book cover.
That should be right up your alley, Pete.
6EQUJ5: Good point about the giraffes. Natural selection is more complex than we generally give it credit for. We humans tend to think linearly, but I reckon NS has probably more of a multi-faceted, fractal way of working, in all sorts of directions we tend to miss.
(p.s. Like the username, but then I’m into astronomy too! Wonder how many other posters here know what it refers to?)
Since a religious explanation essentially amounts to hocus-pocus and abracadabra, it doesn’t take much effort to formulate a vastly superior explanation.
I didn’t think it was heavy handed at all, considering the bunk most kids are forced to swallow in their first fifteen years. Heavy handed is being forced to listen to a raving loon every Sunday telling you that you will certainly burn for eternity if you don’t confess and repent.
The parents are the problem. Luckily, my children have open minds. They’ve heard all the religious side has to say. And have decided it’s quite silly. We have a standard catholic issue statue of Mary that they’ve placed in the corner, because they think she was a bad girl.
Don’t perceive a lot of interest here in involuntarily shutting down churches, but the IDers want to force their ideas on young people. “By their works you shall know them”, heh.
No way, you mean that evolution theory with all its subtleties and simple mechanisms is vastly superior to “GODIDIT”?
How could that be?
What amazes me about evolution – forget about god and such trivialities – is how we can have evolved to the point to have an English biologist in the same environment as a Naked Cowboy. And it’s on film!
EV # 28
As pinatas, nothing will come out as they are all empty shells. Absolutely nothing of substance in any of them.
I posted this on the “Call In” thread, but I think it bears repeating here:
PZ made a good point at the end of the radio show about the concept of a god not adding anything to the scientific debate.
Of course it doesn’t. And if I may be so bold as to add: it never will. Science is all about the search for knowledge. Religion is the total opposite: it fears knowledge. “Goddidit” is a total conversation stopper, a state of mind that denies any debate or opposing point of view. Like a brick wall right across the highway of progress, the “goddidit” ploy (I can’t call it an argument as it isn’t one) is a literal turning your back on the quest for understanding. I want to learn, I want to know, and science tells me. All religion tells me is to shut up and believe. Not for me, thanks. Believing is for children.
Pete Rooke #9:
This is a classic example of an ad hominem argument. The validity–or lack thereof–of “Intelligent Design” must be gauged by the evidence pro or con, not on moral assessments of its proponents or detractors.
Although one can appreciate the temptation to do this sort of thing (no evidence), this is, after all, a science blog.
The best part was at the end, when one of the students said, “I want to learn more.”
What more could a teacher ask?
If there is one thing I can thank my parents for it is that I was not brought up as a god bothering twit. I listened to those kids and I suppose I felt much the way they did at that age but I just can’t remember hanging on to any sort of religion as tenuously as they. The striking part was the use of the term “made to believe.” Fortunately for me I never really had to get over the hump of religious indoctrination. PZ, Dawkins, and other parents like them have very lucky kids.
-DU-
Same problem I find with all of Dawkins T.V. appearances – too short and not enough episodes!
Attenborough is working on a new seies on evolution
so that should be nice and long.
Oh my gosh, what kind of school was that. Those kids needed that good dose of reality. The sad thing is I doubt that Prof. Dawkins had to go far to find children who held those views.
Ah, but then you don’t have the street cred. Like having been a cath in the cracker threads might have given you. I only admire ex-evangelicals.
I’m not so sure about that, Red. From what I’ve seen, they’re full of shit.
Pete… oh Peeeeeeetey….
Uhhhh, we seem to have lost
DickPeter.I personally find it disgraceful that unlike that farce of an interview where you at least have two separate views presented, this is being presented as a *factual* documentary on its on. How any school could knowingly allow Dawkins to have unfettered access to young minds is beyond me. But then a similar argument could be made against PZ Myers at UMM, as well it should.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. There simply IS NO factual alternative to evolution. ID says “man, the earth is like so complicated n’ stuff – God did it”. Creationism says, “God did it”.
Evolution is not up for debate any more. It’s true, it’s a fact, it’s accepted. (except for the religious nut jobs that require no evidence for their beliefs).
El Herring, #48, wrote:
Exactly. It’s a non-answer. From the very first time someone had an answer to something that was at odds with what the witchdoctor/high priest or priestess/shaman was telling everyone was the work of god(s), supporters of religion have been forced to lie and misrepresent to protect their interests.
It’s the same thing today. However, the weakness of the ‘goddidit’ argument is evident in the inconsistencies between how science is regarded in the different fields of inquiry – modern medicine, for example, is based on the very same science that invalidates many of the core beliefs of fundamentalist christians – who, if they were truly consistent, would be at the Christian Science Reading Room and not the hospital.
Some fundy on a hunting trip gets a load of buckshot in his guts from his moonshine-fueled cousin and he’s begging for help from the same ‘science’ he’s been telling his kids isn’t capable of explaining how life came about.
6EQUJ5? Wow!
Just have to wonder how the religious reich are going to handle it. Would it be a bad thing if people like Richard Dawkins or our own PZ went down to the local high school to teach a class on their own specialist subject? I think not.
Beats me how any of them can bring themselves to use computers to spew their hatred of anything scientific. Talk about hypocritical. I actually read one rather nauseating example from one them making the excuse that computers were “technology” and therefore nothing to do with science. Do they think computers are delivered directly from heaven or something? Honestly, I despair for the human race sometimes. “We’re not gonna make it.”
Sorry about the link @51
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/sep/21/bbc.television1
This needs to be in US public schools. I cannot wait to see the next installment. We are fortunate for many things, but access to honest information is really a treat.
Does anyone what museum Dawkins is walking around in during the opening minutes? The one with all the “stuffed animals”.
When talking about the theory of evolution, or when tearing apart religious claims, Dawkins is excellent.
But unfortunately, on the history of science, he’s way, way, way off. I had to stop watching when Dawkins said Darwin was one of the first scientists to realize that fossils were long dead species. That’s nonsense. This fact was well-known in geology and biology even before Darwin was born.
It’s true that a lot of folk stories about fossils involved them being the bones of sinners from the flood or ornaments put in the ground by God or bullshit like that, but these views were primarily among the common folk. They held little or no sway in the scientific community even by the late 1700s.
Yeah, I’ve heard that ‘justification’ before. Well, if it’s one thing the religulous are good at it’s sophistry to aid in preventing cognitive dissonance.
Life extension (respirators for the brain-dead etc.) vs. euthanasia is another area – the argument being that it’s against god’s will for medical science to take a life in order to end suffering; yet, when a life is ending (presumably also what god wants), it’s the job of medical science to keep him at bay for as long as possible – while the person suffers.
And don’t even get me started on how anyone can oppose both abortion and contraception…
I’m not absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s the Natural History Museum in London.
Joe: thanks for that link. It’s good to know that the highly revered Mr. Attenborough is still able and willing to give us the benefits of his colossal wisdom. He’s a national treasure over here, and rightly so. I can’t wait to see his take on Darwin. If his past record is anything to go by, the BBC will throw as much money at him as he needs to get the job done properly. No offence to Dr. Dawkins, but Channel 4 just don’t have the clout the BBC does.
Well, I wish Dawkins would have spoken in my high school science class, way back when I was in high school. I think they did a good job with the first epsiode. I look forward to viewing episode 2 next week. There is never enough time when Dawkins speaks.
This would never be shown on the Fox network but PBS? Maybe, but the creobots would complain about how their tax dollars are being wasted.
I did enjoy watching it. The sex and the lions killing did seem a little overdone after a while. (Hey, I am not against sex, but giraffe and rhino porn doesn’t turn me on!)
Ray Mills #60 wrote:
I think it might depend. Teach evolution? Certainly. Teach public high school students that evolution makes positing the existence of God unnecessary, and is one of the factors which lead to their atheism? No. Despite the fact that I agree with them, in the United States, at least, it would not be appropriate at that level. Certainly not if it’s the theme of their lecture (and not just in response to a personal question.)
Separation of church and state. If it would be wrong for a religious biologist to come in and specifically teach public school children that the study of evolution strengthened and supported his belief in God — and makes the existence of God more likely (twisting into metaphysical pretzels) — then it’s wrong the other way. Either teacher can of course point out the factual controversy, and that some religions have a problem, and some do not, but I don’t think either side can then go on to make their case on way or the other. Not at the high school level, in schools funded by taxpayers of all faiths, and none.
Which, unfortunately, means that this wonderful documentary not only wouldn’t — but probably shouldn’t — be shown to the American analogs of the nice British teens.
giraffe and rhino porn – Qwerty
Giraffes getting it on with rhinos?? This I must see!
Dawkins’ relating to the high school kids was masterful–respectfully distant but at the same time honest and direct. His focusing on that no one should be made to believe anything was much needed. His encouraging them to ask questions and to seek evidence is the perfect antidote to what ails many a school kid. Evidence speaks for itself.
Recently noticed that our comments are now preceded by our IDs. Joy for joy, I now can avoid getting slimed by reading Rooke’s shit by just skipping ever so lightly and happily over his disgusting, disjointed, dishonest detritus. My hot water bill will be much improved, as I will no longer have to shower after reading Rooke’s stinking garbage.
I experienced one of those strange juxtapositions of natural and artificial selection while watching it. As Dawkins was talking about the immense suffering in nature, the drive to eat and avoid being eaten–showing the images of big cats going after and killing anything in sight–my cat Harriet was sitting on my lap purring as I brushed her.
Sastra, #71
Dawkins said that thing about atheism and evolution in the video alright, but did he say it really to the students? All I remember is hearing him questioning his students if they should accept knowledge from hearsay or from order of hearsay.
Jungle love – interspecies style!
Good old Lyme Regis! Though I can’t help feeling a little bitter about having wandered around there for a whole afternoon when I was younger without finding a single fossil.
I liked the documentary, but I don’t know that it would convince anyone of anything; to me it seemed he sort of skated over lots of different points and didn’t really delve into any of them. And maybe this was just the way it was edited, but when he was with the kids he seemed to be stating an awful lot but never really presenting them with the evidence. Still, it’s good to see TV shows really encouraging kids to think about things.
As far as basic explanations go I still prefer David Attenborough’s very succinct summing-up in Life On Earth – watching that as a kid really helped me understand evolution and the progress of life. (And I cannot wait to see the other series he’s planning.)
The Deborah Orr review in the Indy (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/tv-radio-reviews/last-nights-tv-the-genius-of-charles-darwin-channel-4-im-kylies-body-double-bbc-3-885139.html) is just plain silly. The very first sentence sets the tone of smarm and golly-arent-I-clever-with-words.
For example “Dawkins, for such an enthusiastic Darwinist, seems to have no faith at all in social Darwinism” – well duh.
With friends like that, who needs enemas?
This does look really good, from the first two minutes I saw. Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait until I’m back on campus with real internet before I can watch it. I’m sure you guys don’t understand the pain of being STUCK with dial-up with no other practical options.
Jungle love – interspecies style!
Go, Morris, Go!
To be fair to Pete Rooke (I never thought I’d see myself write that), he has, at least, abandoned his perverted misogynistic and violent fantasies-as-analogies approach and resorted to pathetic ad hominem attacks.
The lying about Einstein, of course, is about as low and disingenuous as you can get. So he’s still a scumbag of epic proportions – but at least he’s taking his meds this week.
For anyone interested. I was inspired by the large number of animal love scenes in part 1 of this special, to type in the words “animal sex” into the google search box in my browser. Suffice it to say, I would not recommend anyone clicking on the links that show up, if you decide to go down the same path as I had.
Peter Rooke is here. Time for your daily dose of dead bodies with torture-rape fantasies.
He is BTW, really a priest. However, it is a priest of the Count Dracula Church of Really Fresh Sacraments. Part of the Vatican’s multicultural outreach efforts. Hey, the Undead needed a place for the Vampires, Zombies, and Ghouls.
Not sure where they get their Really FreshTM meat and blood. But I have a feeling that sales of silver bullets, garlic, and wooden stakes in the neighborhood just went up.
Luis Dias #75 wrote:
Hm, good point. It’s a bit hard to say. I watched that bit again, in the school, and he does tell them that evolution is “the explanation for our existence.” And right before he’s in the school, he talks about evolution vs. the belief that “God created our world and everything in it,” as if the beliefs were mutually exclusive.
Certainly an American school would have serious problems with a teacher pointing out that Hindus believe something different, and suggesting that kids should not just accept what they’re told in church. It’s not all that clear that he only means creationism, and not God.
The video entire makes it clear, of course. So I think this documentary wouldn’t be shown in public schools, and probably right. But it’s also a bit dicey whether it would be shown on US television at all, which is definitely wrong.
If it is shown, prepare for lots of reassurances and rebuttals on how evolution says NOTHING about the existence of God, one way or the other — unless you do some theolo-gee, and it strengthens your faith (Wow! Isn’t the world AMAZING! –> God.)
@ Sastra (#39):
Well it’s fair enough for Dawkins and the producers to take whichever slant they prefer with this. And I’m not really complaining; what I’ve seen of it so far is quite good.
It just does seem to me that it’s being billed as an account of Darwin & his theory:
And it seems to me that the (anti-)religion aspect is being somewhat overplayed (maybe it’s the historian of science in me. — cf. the complaint by Jim Harrison in #27 above).
I still haven’t read Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin (it’s on my shelf, and on my list), but I strongly doubt that Darwin actually underwent a radical transformation from young-Earth creationism to old-Earth naturalism, but it seems that the program is trying to imply that such a transformation took place. (Perhaps I’m misinterpreting, but that’s what I took away.) But isn’t it the case that naturalists were already pretty comfortable with a pretty old Earth that contradicted Genesis, and with a form of evolution (specifically Lamarkian)?
But, that said, I am inclined to think that the religious origin of the current resistance to Darwin (as evidenced nicely by the students that Dawkins is teaching) does do quite a bit to justify tackling the religion vs. science theme head on. And the show does a good job of it.
I love the seeing the antelopes being flung in the air by cheetahs, great acrobatics!
That was simply brilliant. Every time Richard puts forward the comparison of the ToE’s power to explain to that which does the explaining. It’s really a very simple idea, but its implications are immense. I look forward to the the next program and hope that you’ll post them here, too. Thanks, PZ!
That was just great. I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much for posting that PZ.
Beautifully done, Richard. Great job. I am oh so jealous too that you’ve been to the Galapagos Islands and to Down House. Someday… Oh yes, and let me say that your voice was made to make documentaries.
Thanks a lot
Thanks PZ – this first episode was terrific (I saw from your post it was Out There and watched CrucieFiction’s YouTube videos)!
Too bad we will never see it on any US channels.
If one of the greatest intellects on evolution can’t convince someone that evolution is a fact and the bible is wrong, what hope is there for the future?
Dawkins at his eloquent best.
Thanks for posting this.
I like the episode but am skeptical that Dawkins’s approach had any real impact on the students. Using them is unconvincing and a distraction. i’d prefer his using no students.
Also, Dawkins makes two editorial moves that I always take issue with: 1) Pronouncing evolution British style as “evilution” which plays right into the the hands or Idiots and their first cousins, creos; and 2) both Dawkins and students expressing a “belief” in evolution.
I can accept the students doing so–they don’t know any better–but Dawkins has no excuse. One believes in dogmas, but accepts science–provisionally. Maybe I’m a nit picker, but I eschew the use of “believe” when I talk about any scientific theory or idea, especially when talking with someone whose knowledge of science is shallower than mine.
I am sure PZ will continue to post the episodes, you can also view the episodes on Dawkins’ web page.
http://richarddawkins.net/
Keanus- sorry, I’m with Dawkins and I find this kind of pedantic (or rather, would-be pedantic, since it’s incorrect) comment (a rather popular meme around here, as I know) extremely irritating. Anybody who has read a little in epistemology will know that there is nothing wrong with using the concept of belief in such a context, and that beliefs perfectly well can (and should) be held provisionally. There are justified beliefs and there are unjustified beliefs. It’s the latter than are the problem.
I liked it quite a lot. Just the part with the students was a little bit painful to watch.
Bravo! A very bold statements from Prof. Dawkins. Will love to see more of the upcoming episodes. Thanks for posting the video, PZ!
Jim Harrison @ # 27: You’d have to look very hard to find a reputable geologist in 1800 who was unaware of the great antiquity of the Earth.
True, James Hutton published his theory of uniformitarianism in 1795, but it gained relatively little acceptance before Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830. Serious natural philosophers (the term “science” wasn’t coined until the 1830s) didn’t accept the biblical notion of a 6,000-year-old earth, but few were thinking in terms of megacenturies either.
If Darwin, a friend of Lyell, hadn’t soaked himself in the ideas of “deep time” in his early days as a geologist, he wouldn’t have had the mental framework ready to conceptualize what millions of generations could mean to species development – one reason why he was two steps ahead of other “natural history” researchers.
#82 DaveUH wrote:
I was trying to find the end credits to Kinsey, which featured a long succession of different animals mating to the tune of Little Willie John’s “Fever,” but no luck. The best I could find was Rita Moreno singing “Fever” with Animal on The Muppet Show.
Cool stuff! Makes me want to go back and read “Origin of Species” again. I didn’t fully grasp the majesty when I was 13 (and it was required reading.)
I tend to agree with Physicalist #32 that the science vs. religion wasn’t necessary in talking about evolution and Darwin. Maybe I’m just a pollyanna, but I was always fascinated with science and soaked it all up, even though I was also being taught religion as a child. When I was older, with all that science background, I was able to look at religion more objectively and go, “oh, that’s silly.” However, if you start with “religion has it wrong” you may turn off certain people who are trying to tune into the science. In general, I think it’s best to let the science soak in and take it’s course, then point out the problems with religion.
Dawkins talking about the horror of life in the natural world in the dark was creepy! Wow! Very interesting and entertaining show overall.
#70:
Porn, schmorn. Ever since I heard that giraffes have six-foot-long purple tongues, just the word is enough to…
‘Scuse me, gotta log off now and throw the cat off the bed.
#67 @Emmet Caulfield | August 6, 2008 7:55 PM
“Does anyone what museum Dawkins is walking around in during the opening minutes? The one with all the “stuffed animals”.”
I’m not absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s the Natural History Museum in London.
It one of the annexes of that museum. The scene in the large hall with the large dinosaur was also filmed there. It’s the main entrance.
SINNERS BURN IN HELL
McCAIN ’08
DEATH IS THE ONLY ANSWER
OIL IS OUR CUM
FACTS ARE FOR FAGGOTS
DIE YOU STUPID ELITE CUNTS
#93 @Keanus | August 6, 2008 10:23 PM
Also, Dawkins makes two editorial moves that I always take issue with: 1) Pronouncing evolution British style as “evilution” which plays right into the the hands or Idiots and their first cousins, creos;
I take your point 2, but on point 1 you do realise this was made for British television? Nobody pronounces the word any other way in the UK. The “e as in every” pronunciation is not used here. I don’t think this program was aimed at idiots.
#90 @foxfire | August 6, 2008 9:49 PM
Too bad we will never see it on any US channels.
Why not? Didn’t his other programmes make it there?
#84, @Sastra | August 6, 2008 8:50 PM
Certainly an American school would have serious problems with a teacher pointing out that Hindus believe something different, and suggesting that kids should not just accept what they’re told in church. It’s not all that clear that he only means creationism, and not God.
Yeah, British school culture is very different on this point. Teachers do discuss religious views critically here. It’s not an issue here. No First Amendment.
Just watched this, and I generally liked it. I have one issue, though, and its something I’ve noticed other people doing in their posts here. Dawkins refers to evolution as a “fact”. While I don’t doubt evolution, I don’t like using this term for it. In the realm of science, there are data, there are hypotheses to explain those data, and there are hypotheses that have been sufficiently tested to become robust theories. These theories can then be further refined. But there isn’t really anything in science we can refer to as a fact (although the word could be considered to be synonymous with “datum”). Now, I know that the IDiots and creationists love it when we call it a theory, as they only know that word in the colloquial sense (I literally scream when I hear people say “It’s only a theory”. Yeah–so is gravity, and yet the Earth hasn’t drifted off away from the sun…). But I don’t think the solution to the problem is to start calling Evolution and Gravity “facts”. The solution is to educate people what we mean by “theory”. I realize this is all semantic, and maybe I’m being too picky about a television show, but I am really bothered when any scientist claims something is a fact. If their work is later revised, and the “facts” get changed, its just fodder for those who would try to tear science down.
Ok, sorry for the rant. Really, though, I liked the show–especially that they ended it with the last sentence of “The Origin of Species”. Probably my favorite quote ever :)
Booo. Piss poor attempt. All caps but no BOLD or Italics>. Sure you included a couple of slurs and you made some weak sexual reference, but over all very poor attempt. The anger is even pretty lame.
I only gave you points on this “DEATH IS THE ONLY ANSWER” for it’s unrelated content in a comment that is totally unrelated.
I give it a 3.5
Do you think DAWKINS was the only Atheist in Africa.
Anybody with doubts as to whether geologists accepted the great antiquity of the Earth circa 1800 are advised to read Martin J.S. Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time (2005) and Worlds Before Adam (2008). (I could cite various other texts on the period 1770-1830 that would reinforce Rudwick’s version of how geology came to terms with deep time. Rudwick’s accounts, however, have the virtue of being extraordinarily detailed.)
From the introduction to Worlds Before Adam:
“…all the geologists with whom this book is concerned were convinced that geohistory had been played out on a timescale of humanly inconceivable magnitude (though they had as yet no means to put reliable figures on it). The many who were also religious believers saw no conflict between their geology and their understanding of the Creation stories in Genesis; they had long since learned that it was a religious mistake to treat biblical texts as if they were scientific sources, because an inappropriate literalism deflected attention away from religious meaning. It is true that some of these geologists, particularly in England, had to confront vocal critics–the self-styled ‘scriptural’ writers–who relentlessly pursued a literalist line of maters of ‘geology and Genesis.” But this, like the modern and peculiarly American phenomenon of creationism and other forms of religious fundamentalism, was a contingent feature of a particular time, place, and, above all, social location.”
For the record, I’m making an issue of seconding Rudwick’s observation, not out of a desire to defend anybody’s religion but to defend history, an independent discipline which shouldn’t be turned into a cartoon for propaganda purposes.
Hey! During the dig of the giant sloths, the researchers were wearing “Hall of Florida Fossils” shirts! This is referencing the excellent Forida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, on the campus of the University of Florida.
Seriously, if any of you are in the area, it is an excellent museum which definitely does not shy away from the evoloutionary aspects of deep history. The lobby contains the side-by-side fossils of a mammoth and a mastodon, the actual Hall of Florida Fossils has an entire wall featuring the teeth of extinct sharks, which can still be simply sifted out of the local streams, and a giant example of the ground sloth.
Also, it has butterflies, but you have to pay extra for that.
Severely off topic (apologies): have anyone seen this post by Razib on Gene Expression?
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/08/richard_dawkins_islamophobe.php
Would seem someone hacked his blog, but then he posted entries following this one. Being sarcastic to make a point? He’s awfully persevering in the comments, too.
Scares this living white male a bit…
Yall are way ahead of me, I’m just now listening Ray Comfort.
Had to rig for the fake hurricane.
Rigging for fake hurricanes is just as hard as for real hurricanes, but the clean up is a lot easier.
@ #107
I understand why this would annoy you but remember this is intended for the general public, and Dawkins knows that if he said “theory” it would be interpreted in the colloquial sense, which would leave the door open to the creos to say “Aha, so you don’t even claim evolution is a fact?”
While it was sad to see young minds polluted by blind faith, I also thought I saw (perhaps wishfully) a spark of inquiry had been set in all of them. I wonder what would have happened if Dawkins had more than a day with them?
Terrific job RD! Now, if we can just get it picked up by a U.S. channel.
Its not an annex I’ve ever found. I think its the NHM’s Rothschild Museum at Tring, which is also where they keep the bird collection.
From the relatively safe haven of the UK, it’s sometimes difficult to remember just how bad you have it over there. I can’t imagine living in a country where that statement would be even slightly contentious.
Libby Purves has an article about this documentary in today’s (London) Times. In it, she says that I offered the children a choice
This is typical of the religiously-inspired criticisms that have appeared in the British newspapers. It is, of course, monstrously untrue, and an insult to me as an educator. It was the creationist children themselves who made the leap: “Evolution = Atheism”. I was scrupulously careful NOT to make that connection to the children, although I have done so elsewhere, spelling the argument out in detail in The God Delusion.
Libby Purves goes on to say
I expect it’s true that the few believers Libby Purves meets at smart London dinner parties are not creationists. But “MOST believers”? Does anyone know of any good figures on this? How about most believers in Pakistan? Indonesia? The Arab world? South America? Indeed, North America? Even Britain? If more than 40% of the population of the United States and Britain are creationists, the figure has got to be higher for the subset who call themselves believers. I’d be extremely surprised if the true figure is less than 50%.
Libby Purves’s article can be seen here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article.ece
Timesonline accepts COMMENTS.
Richard
But “MOST believers”?
From my experience, if the religious exhibit anything consistently, it’s projection.
regardless of whether they consider themselves “moderate”, or “the only true members”, they will inevitably project their own individual religious rationalizations onto all others they consider within their “group”.
Oh, and keep up the great work, Richard. It’s more than needed.
don’t let the bastards get you down.
Oi! God!
It’s D__KINS to you. Show some respect!
…btw, the link provided to the times article gives an error on my end. I think it left the article number off.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article4474112.ece
Is this the correct article?
Sorry, the link to Libby Purves’s article got broken. Let me try again.
Richard
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article.ece
Yet again, the system cut the vital numbers out of my posting of the link to the Times article. The link given by Ichthyic is correct. I won’t attempt to reproduce it, because the same thing will probably happen. Thank you Ithchyic.
Richard
#108
Just to throw a monkey wrench. It’s interesting that we get excited about discoveries that reveal the age of the Earth and Universe as ancient. These are only recent discoveries in terms of Western , post so-called ‘enlightenment.’
The fact is, over ten thousand years of civilization, the fucktard cultures who thought the Earth was young is a tiny insignificant minority. All of the East and South Asian Cultures, Egyptian and African traditions, and the entire pre-Columbian American Civilizations recognized their existence in an ageless cycle, no problem at all with infinity, or cycles in the billions of years.
Granted, they had no scientific proofs that we know of, but that doesn’t change the fact that they happened to be right, while the tiny minority of Middle Eastern Death Cults, and their ridiculous pinkBoy spawn are just now recovering from their 2000 year old stupor, and patting themselves on the back for discovering what the vast majority of humanity has known since the last ice age.
I’m not knocking the Enlightenment, nor the importance of the scientific method, but it sure was a roundabout way to get back to what everybody else on the planet already knew.
Re: the age of things – Sam Harris says it so very well:
I think we should found our own Godless-heathen country. Lets go overtake Greenland. It’ll be fantastic, and we can show this on T.V. 24/7! =D
Wow:
What is baffling is that this ignorance resides only in modern cultures, the descendants of ‘rationalism’ and enlightenment. It’s a new thing.
Thats what’s crazy upside down world about it.
Scooter,
This might sound weird, but do you think it might be because it gives them something they can be vocal about? There’s really no other way god can play a part in the life of a modern, first-world human being; perhaps this is the only way they’ve got to prove to god that they’re supporting ‘him’?
Lee
Conquest?
Work harder on expelling your inner-Christian.
People are saying that Richard Dawkins criticised the kids’ religion in the school based segment. I didnt see that. What I saw was him questioning their reasons to believe. He asked questions like “Is that a good reason to believe something?” rather than make statements like “You believe stupid stuff”. My main problem with the sections in school is that he got a class of about 8 or 10 really well behaved kids whereas I have to deal with 30 kids many of whom just want to kill each other.
I would take issue with the opening statement “What Darwin achieved was nothing less than a complete explanation of the complexity and diversity of all life.”
Without Mendelian genetics evolutionary theory was far from a complete explanation (Darwins blending theory would have resulted in diversity decreasing in successive generations).
That’s a small point overall in what was a good program. As for the reviews, they are what can be expected from the British press. The Science/Humanities divide is vividly illustrated in these pieces. Its all too common to hear a sneering attitude towards scientists from UK newspaper columnists, virtually none of whom have the slightest education in scientific matters beyond secondary school level.
#116. Yes, I think from the sheer size of the gallery that it might be Tring. There is a corridor-shaped mammal gallery in the Blue area at the main museum but I don’t think it has the sheer number of specimens of similar ungulates that is shown in the scene where Dawkins is walking down the museum corridor.
Wow:
Perhaps it comes form their own doubt. It’s a militant over-reaction to prove their faith to themselves.
I think you’ve hit on something.
I dunno , Wow.
It blows my mind that Dawkins and Hitchens and even PZ didn’t pick up on the con of religion until they were in their teens.
I thought it was the stoopidest, most incoherent, pathetic attempt to manipulate behavior imaginable when I was about 7 years old.
I didn’t need science nor evolution to reveal the obvious.
And my original point is that 99.9% of the people on earth, were not as stoopid as this atheist movement, who bought into this crap untiol they were college sophmores
Modernity, in the Western equation doesn’t reflect rationality, we are playing Catch -up.
Only in the context of this incredibly ignorant, backward Western civilization does the New Atheist movement seem radical.
“How any school could knowingly allow priests to have unfettered access to young minds is beyond me.”
Fixed that for ya Pete.
“…the girl said she still believes what the bible tells her, yet we know, truthfully, she has no idea what all is in her church’s version of the bible. That’s what’s so sad, blind submission to powerful authority.”
My thoughts, exactly! I really loved that Dawkins questioned the students on whether or not they should just believe what they’re told. I think they’re all probably too young to just up and realise what they’ve all been taught in church is wrong… Well, not realise. I think they did realise, but weren’t comfortable enough to take that next step. Hopefully, though, when they all get a bit older, they’ll remember the experience.
The ungulates in the Mammal Gallery are all in the Whale Hall, which is very different. The corridor that leads to it has the other groups, and the cabinets and décor are totally different.
If it isn’t Tring (and the photos of Tring on their webpage seem to match the cabinets, so I reckon it is) its probably an Oxbridge (or similar university) Zoology museum.
The Bible is a spiritual book and not a science book. It explains the very beginning and does not go into detail because it was ment to get a glimpse of what happened and not go into detail because it is not a science book. The focus is on God and how man should live at his best.
Science can break down and look in detail what God created from nothing.
1) God Creates the universe and everything out of nothing. God is light himself.
2) When God creates all animals and humans, they all have the finger print of God because he creating everything will have many genes that are in common. The same way you can tell an artist from the painting brush strokes you can tell the handy work of God.
3) God creates a code in the genes that are then passed down through time. God only has to jump start the process and then his work is on it’s own control. The same reason the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun. This is put in motion from God and then it is on it’s own control after it is set in motion.
4) God created the creatures at the start but they evolve over time. Not into another species, but internally of their own species.
I believe in Evolution a bit. I just don’t believe that it went down the way Richard Dawkins says it did.
Having evidence is not enough when you can’t test something that happened a long time ago.
If I had a car accident and three people told what happened and they all told different stories in the way it happened, then which way is it? We could try to prove it from a point of view and they might both look like it could end up in the same damage in two totally different ways.
I believe in Science for the most part because we can not only back it up with evidence but because we can produce the same results every time based on many paths. However, evolution is not the same as every other form of science. You have to prove something that happened before you were around and that is not easy to do.
So, just because I don’t believe like you does not mean I am stupid.
Jolly good show. I guess those kids don’t know the difference between science and religion, and why science is the only option. I hope they will learn though. After all, we don’t get to choose reality.
Scooter,
I’m in the never-believed camp as well. I don’t know what was weirder for me – having the concept of god explained to me or learning that there were people who appeared to genuinely believe in it. It just didn’t make sense as far as I was concerned.
But I wasn’t exactly brought up in a culture of strong indoctrination. I’m sure it’s different for those who were constantly surrounded by people using every means necessary – preventing access to dissenting opinions, telling them they have to believe to be a good person, implying that there’s something wrong with them if they don’t. Or, even worse, threatening that they’ll lose their family and friends.
What’s even more appalling is that they think they’re doing good.
#137
How did this god of yours create everything? I mean, intelligence was already there, otherwise god could not have created anything.
God’s own mind was already there, with the intelligence, the knowledge on how to create anything at all, and the desire to do it. So apparently he didn’t create exactly everything, and certainly didn’t invent everything.
And of course you need to think really hard on why you choose that particular mythology and not any other. I mean, you say that a little evidence is not enough, which undeniably means that no evidence is even worse. Do you have evidence for your particular god? No…?
Chris #137
You are not stupid. You probably live in an environment that supports the views you profess. That makes you sane and rational in that context.
It’s an act of courage or insanity to step outside that world view.
You have to decide which is which.
Chris, #137, wrote:
That’s not a particularly good analogy, Chris. Technically, science would be able to tell you exactly what happened by gathering all the evidence and putting it all together – damage to the car, damage to what it hit, skid marks, distance it traveled from the road, displacement of soil and so forth. It’s probably more precise than you think.
What it mightn’t be able to tell you, however, is why the accident happened. But one of the key benefits of evolution over creationism is that there doesn’t need to be a why.
There’s just an is.
And it’s not about stupidity – smart people do stupid things all the time. But it is about intellectual honesty, and anyone who is smart and intellectually honest won’t have a problem with evolution.
#118, Richard Dawkins | August 7, 2008 3:39 AM
This is typical of the religiously-
inspired-impaired criticisms that have appeared in the British newspapersFixed your typo. Hope that helps.
Wow:
I was.
Evangelical Midwest fire and brimstone. I was scared shitless of going to hell, until they put me in Bible school, and I heard about Noahs Ark , the tower of Babel, and all those badly written comic books, then I knew I was being conned.
That worshiping dead meat on a stick was weirder than playing doctor with sylvia next door.
I wonder what sylvia is up yo these days.
The programme set out Dawkins’ aims in the intro – “In this series, I want to persuade you that evolution offers a far richer and more spectacular view of life than any religious story. It’s one reason why I don’t believe in god.” From an early review in the Times it seems that the programme might have been titled “Dawkins on Darwin” and that would have been more appropriate. Trying to persuade the children to discard their religion was contrary to Darwin’s own approach, and while he too made the point that Hindu beliefs are just as valid, it could have been more helpful to the pupils to realise that many religious people see Genesis as an important religious text without it being a scientific text, and so find no contradiction between their faith and evolution.
The first twenty minutes were riddled with historical inaccuracies, not least the point that an ancient earth became accepted in science when Darwin was still a young child, and at university he learnt about it when studying geology under Sedgwick. The adolescent Charles Darwin wasn’t so much contemplating an easy life as a country parson as pushed into it by his shrewd father as a career where a good “living” could be bought. It wasn’t his family connections that got him the invitation to join the survey voyage on the Beagle, it was the old boy network of his university tutor responding to FitzRoy’s request for a gentleman companion.
The programme jumps from Darwin’s rhea collecting in his early months on South America straight to the Galapagos islands… “Here he began to wonder why God would have created distinctive kinds of tortoise, finch or iguana on more or less identical small islands.” Darwin didn’t even bother with collecting the tortoises labelled by island, and didn’t realise that the “blackbirds, wrens and gross-beaks” were all finches until that was revealed by Gould after the voyage. While he’d shown curiosity and questioning of creations at the very start of the voyage, the first real sign that he was wondering about evolution came in the last months of the voyage when returning from South Africa, when he noted his thoughts that the facts about the relationship of tortoises and mockingbirds (not finches) to individual Galapagos islands, and the similar situation reported regarding the Falklands islands fox, could undermine the stability of species.
The next statement in the programme is “This pattern of relationships became even more intriguing when Darwin encountered fossils.” Darwin actually found fossils at Punta Alta in September 1832, and didn’t get to the Galapagos islands until two years later. During the voyage, Darwin wasn’t struck by the way that “the fossils closely resembled in every other detail the skeletons of modern sloths living nearby”, but after the voyage Owen revealed that sort of detail to Darwin, who’d barely had a glimmering of the idea as far as I’ve found. And it’s certainly untrue to say that “Darwin was one of the first scientists to correctly identify them as long dead species of animals” – Cuvier made that identification of the Megatherium in the 1790s. As for the “pioneering work of Charles Lyell”, that was rather a popularisation building on the pioneering work of James Hutton and bringing the ideas to a much wider audience.
Not a good standard of research for a programme about Darwin, but then it seems to be more of a vehicle for Dawkins to comment on evolution and religion. That’s welcome in intself, but an opportunity lost in terms of explaining Darwin.
Hi Chris, you can believe what you want, but your arguments are pretty bad.
If god can create stuff out of nothing, why not the universe? Who created your god, etc. etc.
I’m sorry, same designer = same genes doesn’t hold up. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izl5BB2AkZE for the background.
There’s no need for this hypothesis. We already know nature can do those things.
So there’s a mechanism or process we haven’t found that stops mutations once they cross the line of “their own species”? Are you serious?
This is a ridiculous claim that’s founded in a misunderstanding of the scientific method. Just because something happened before we were around doesn’t mean there is no evidence for it or that it would be particularly hard to establish such a fact from evidence.
If you were right, we’d have a very different form of justice. Judges usually aren’t around when the crime happens (not where I live that is), so what are all these people doing on death row when it’s all so hard to tell as you say?
#145
how is it that the Christians get all the good acid, and we’re left listening to Garcia on beer?
Scooter,
Well done on making it out of that nightmare. It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.
Chris #137
The trouble with your argument, from a scientific point of view, is that it is usually applied to questions the believer has doctrinal reason for doubting and never to questions with which they are comfortable.
For instance I rarely hear the same argument being applied to things like astronomy. That, essentially, is a historical science, just like the study of evolution. No astronomer is studying a galaxy in its current state, rather he or she is looking at things that happened centuries or even millions or billions of years in the past. Should we doubt that galaxies exist?
How about something like the ice age? Did any current scientist witness it?
How about applying the argument to history?
Is there a single person alive today who witnessed the American civil war, slavery, the black death, the Roman empire?
Should we discount all of these?
Or perhaps we should only accept what the evidence suggests it is reasonable to believe – and in the case of evolution even religious scientists like Francis Collins and Ken Miller accept the evidence points to the same timeline and pathway of evolution as accepted by Richard Dawkins.
It’s an act of courage or insanity to step outside that world view.
You have to decide which is which.
I do not see a problem with the view that I wrote. I think it is the most scientific view of all of them. I believe parts of evolution are true and I view it from a different view point. I do not believe that all life is from a tree of life branching out and evolving from one cell. I believe that all life has very simular genes because they were made by the same God. The same way there are very simular paintings from an artist.
The code in the DNA has been started by an intelligent source.
A virus is written from a human on a computer. If it is intelligent enough sooner or later it can evolve over time using bits and pieces of information that it finds using networks. An example, finds an smtp server, now it uses that to send out parts of itself to other networks or an FTP server or a web server.
Basically, that is the way I see it. God can be involved in Creation, but then it takes a life on its own and evolves on its own. God doesn’t have to be involved in the maintenence, only the creation.
So, while you see Evolution as something that says God does not exist, I say that he does and he creates life processes to do the work for him.
While you see God as a Myth, I see him as a reality and he lets us live our lives and learn in our own way. You see God as an outdated excuse and science is correct in everything.
I see things as science is an asset for human kind and I think that evolution is a part of science that is hard to prove because it is in the past. I do not think that God is something that is outdated at all. It’s like saying rain is outdated even though its been raining for a long time.
The reason about the stupid thing is when someone posts a comment on here and people don’t agree they call them stupid. This place is very hostile to new ideas it seems.
By the way, PZ, your clock is wrong. It’s 1015 but your inferior American confuter thinks I typed the last comment more than four hours ago.
That, essentially, is a historical science, just like the study of evolution. No astronomer is studying a galaxy in its current state, rather he or she is looking at things that happened centuries or even millions or billions of years in the past. Should we doubt that galaxies exist?
There are so many changes that the earth has gone through that it is not easy to say the evolution happened from one species to another. I have serious doubts about this concept as it is not logical. Yes, there maybe fossils and other evidence but there can be many different views at looking at the evidence. It’s not the Bible that tells me this, it is looking at this evidence that tells me this. It is not logical in my mind. I am not a stupid person, but the evidence that I have seen and even this video do not make sense.
I am trying to learn here but I just can’t get past the problems of okay there are simularty in the Genes, how about looking at the differences. Why is it impossible that this could not be a signature of the creator? How does this evidence show that everything has evolved from a single cell. If a simple cell evolved from nothing, it had to have a start, intelligence had to be added to it that is beyond an xray or whatever to build the patern of life.
How do you get from a simple cell to migrate to something to a human billions of years later down the line. Xrays and other forms of mutation would not be enough information to get it to that point. There had to be information added from somewhere that helped it in the process. Why are we not seeing this on other planets? I mean this would make life very abundant out there.
Now saying that, I believe evolution is possible to bring about small changes of species and viruses mutating. However, to change from one form of animal into another just magically does not make sense.
Sorry guys I just can’t believe in that. It’s not logical. It seems to me that we are trying to stretch things to make them seem like they are real.
#150
“The reason about the stupid thing is when someone posts a comment on here and people don’t agree they call them stupid. This place is very hostile to new ideas it seems.”
Chris, nobody called you stupid for your views, they just found your points of argument to be woeful.
Try reading some of the things people wrote in response to you rather than ignoring them and acting defensive. Remember, scientists may occasionally sound or act arrogant but they are absolutely vulnerable to solid evidence that disproves their points.
But evolution isn’t supported just by similarity. It predicts a specific pattern of similarity and dissimilarity. It’s not enough just to handwave away some vague notion of similarity; you need to engage with the detailed evidence in support of evolution.
Past or present doesn’t matter. The reasoning is the same. I didn’t see the computer I’m using made, nor do I have any eye-witness testimony from anyone who did. That doesn’t mean I can’t know anything about how it was made.
The only problem with past events is that some data may not be available. That’s not a problem in this case, since we have an overwhelming amount of data in support of evolution.
Chris #150
I accept your apology, I thought you were a Creationist
Since you didn’t really engage my previous objections.
There is magic involved in evolution? Isn’t that your working hypothesis? Puppies from cats and all that?
I wonder how many of those kids will ever grasp how friggen cool it was to have Richard Dawkins himself personally taking them on a field trip! Talk about a major highlight of your life!
But Chris, that’s the whole point of science; to determine which view fits the evidence better. You have your idea about what produced the evidence we see, and we have ours. So, we take each idea and work out what additional evidence we ought to see if that idea is correct. We also work out what evidence we ought not to see. We then go out looking for new evidence, and compare with our predictions.
But of course, we don’t need to start from scratch; the theory of evolution is about 150 years old, and scientists have been testing its predictions all along the way. Creationists have been around much longer, and their ideas have been tested too. Guess which idea won in the end. That’s right, the one almost every professional biologist in the world accepts.
I agree with Martin #154 on the over-used term stupidity
I prefer the term
I don’t know anybody in my social circles (which are quite varied) who wasn’t a bit surprised by the religious kids in the programme. You just don’t expect anyone with an enquiring mind (and 16 year-olds have that in abundance) to be quite so taken in by their parents wishy-washy crap. Where’s a spot of healthy teenage rebellion when you need it?
I thought the first episode, whilst good, was a bit of a hook for the proles, though. I’ll be looking forward to the next one involving examining social Darwinism, which will hopefully have a bit more meat to it.
I’ve never tried religion. Well maybe once, but I didn’t inhale.
Dumber than a bag of Hammers
cactusren @ 107:
The best way around it I ever saw is to say, “It is a fact that evolution takes place, in much the same way that it is a fact that there is gravity, the economy, and weather. We have theories about how all of those work (in fact, our theories about evolution are more well-supported than our theories about the others); these theories are modified as more data are collected, but the modification of theories does not undermine the fact of the phenomenon or process.”
I wish I remembered where I picked that up…
PS: Don’t apologize for picking nits!
Chris, I can appreciate that you’re honestly looking for answers here.
If you say a creator wrote the initial DNA and then set it going on its own, then you still need evolution to bring it up to the current complexity. Remember that lots of mutations are happening simultaneously all the time, it’s not like evolution works on one thing, finishes that and then goes onto the next.
My main objection to your viewpoint however is that a creator complex enough to write a DNA code itself requires an explanation. Call it “god” or one of the mysterious “precursor” aliens, you still need to explain an origin for them. so you don’t solve the question, you just put it back.
Evolution requires no such step, it is an emergent property of a self sustaining, replicating system that does not have a 100% copy accuracy and a range of environments to exist in.
And life might be common. Complex life considerably less so and intelligent complex life astonishingly so. Go read “Where is everybody- 50 Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox” by Stephen Webb.
#157, brnofeathers | August 7, 2008 6:38 AM
I wonder how many of those kids will ever grasp how friggen cool it was to have Richard Dawkins himself personally taking them on a field trip! Talk about a major highlight of your life!
I think they would have preferred the Kenyan veldt to Lyme Regis, though :)
1) God Creates the universe and everything out of nothing. God is light himself.
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If god can create stuff out of nothing, why not the universe? Who created your god, etc. etc.
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That is what I mean. The universe, the earth and all living things were created by God. God is beyond this entire Earth and Universe and is not bound by any laws including time and space. If he created it then he has existed forever because nobody created him. I know you don’t understand that but why does God have to submit himself to humankind when we are like an ant to him in knowledge.
I think of it as the Matrix. We are all living out our lives in what we believe to be reality, however there is an outside to this reality and God has control over it.
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2) When God creates all animals and humans, they all have the finger print of God because he creating everything will have many genes that are in common. The same way you can tell an artist from the painting brush strokes you can tell the handy work of God.
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I’m sorry, same designer = same genes doesn’t hold up. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izl5BB2AkZE for the background.
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I watched the video and still did not prove to me that there was not a designer. Just basically showed what I thought. It just showed the intelligence of the design. Building blocks of design.
It reminds me of binary representing bits that are used together to form bytes. You take 8 bits and then combine them into bytes and then you can use these bits to switch them and turn them into a character. Depending on which you turn on, you get a different letter.
This code which basically is a code that is passed down means that that animal will be built in that fashion, the same as the bytes turning into chracter example. It still does not prove that God does not exist, in fact it shows that they are not random at all and that an intelligence started the entire process.
Computers were built by humans with intelligence and we can see that here as well, God built the code and put that into all living things.
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This is a ridiculous claim that’s founded in a misunderstanding of the scientific method. Just because something happened before we were around doesn’t mean there is no evidence for it or that it would be particularly hard to establish such a fact from evidence.
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Well the scientific method works when you can use it reliably. I just feel that it can’t be used very well to examine things that you can’t not test in realtime.
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If you were right, we’d have a very different form of justice. Judges usually aren’t around when the crime happens (not where I live that is), so what are all these people doing on death row when it’s all so hard to tell as you say?
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Well evidence is not always right. Sometimes evidence can put people in prison when they are innocent.
When you have humans in the process and politics and evidence that existed long before you came around and many different view points to that evidence doubts can occur.
Remember, science can change and what we thought was right before can be wrong tomorrow. As we learn new things the evidence is still the same but can be viewed differently.
If you have ever written a computer program you will know that in many ways it is very simular to that of the process of the scientific method. There are lots of simularities.
I have written one before that worked one way, but failed in another way and I found out that the problem was the program that I wrote worked fine, but when I put it up against a piece of software that I thought I had tested from different paths did not work. It turned out that it would change depending on many variables that I didn’t account for. In the same way the scientific method can have the same issues.
Nothing in this world is perfect, not even the scientific method.
I must go to bed. Hopefully we can pick this up again some other time.
I’m surprised that nobody has yet posted a link to Larry Moran’s essay “Evolution is a Fact and a Theory” in response to this. So here it is: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
Chris,
It’s also important to note that science can’t be wrong – because science is simply a method for discovering what is right. If it’s not right it’s not science.
Scientists (on the other hand) can, do, and will continue to get things wrong – and they should be the first to admit it, because that’s how the scientific process works: a sort of trial and error. But to say science is wrong is like blaming a spanner for not fitting a nut – using a spanner isn’t the wrong way to do it; it’s just that you haven’t grabbed the right one.
God and science cannot be in opposition – though people who believe in god and people who use science obviously can – and are. If god exists then he’s within science. If he’s not within science then he’s irrelevant.
If you genuinely want to understand more there’s plenty of information out there. Try Talk Origins – it has a lot of good stuff about evolution and how it works.
Chris, you clearly are not a biologist and have no idea of what the theory of evolution actually predicts (for instance, there’s no magical transformations into new species). I suggest you read about specific points in biology before trying to argue about the evidence.
As a quick example I suggest you read about L-gulonolactone oxidase. This is the gene responsible for the synthesis of vitamin C. In humans this gene is broken. No human has an L-gulonolactone oxidase gene that works, in contrast to most mammals, whose L-gulonolactone oxidase gene functions fine. We get by because our diet contains plenty of vitamin C from plants and fruit so we dont need to synthesize it ourselves. However we are not the only species that has a broken L-gulonolactone oxidase gene. Both monkeys, apes and guinea pigs also have non functional genes.
In evolutionary theory humans are predicted to be closely related to apes and monkeys and less related to guinea pigs. In the case of guinea pigs many of their close rodent relatives do not have a broken L-gulonolactone oxidase gene.
Now evolutionary theory makes a prediction here.
It predicts that the exact position of the break in the L-gulonolactone oxidase gene is likely to be the same in monkeys and apes but is very likely to be different in guinea pigs.
This is exactly what we find.
This is but one example of genetic evidence. There are literally millions of separate points of evidence within the human and other genomes that back up evolutionary theory. The only logical way this could fit in with the similar design hypothesis is that your God is creating a false trail to make it LOOK LIKE genomes have a common ancestor and that even though the genomic evidence indicates that the degree of similarity exactly matches the predicted pattern of the fossil evolutionary tree, it is entirely because God created it in this way to fool us into thinking this for some unknown reason.
Its not similarity that gives away ancestry, its the mistakes and mutations. Its the chromosomal rearrangements. Its the endogenous retroviruses. Its the gene duplications and deletions.
Chris, try reading a little about molecular genetics and then think whether your arguments still hold water.
It’s not just their parents, it’s more likely their whole ethnic community.
chris @ 152:
You almost have your answer to this question, in the question itself:
It is a little like someone in Italy reading about Marco Polo and saying, “I can see how you can walk across the room, or maybe the town, but there is no way anyone could walk all the way to China, even if they had years in which to do it!”
And, of course, the answer is right there: step by tiny step, each insignificant in itself, but given enough time, a man can walk to China and back. Given billions of years, something like a cyanobacterium can become… us, and all the living things we see around us. It all looks like it is “painted with the same brush” because it is descended from the same source.
The man was right, and it bears repeating:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.
brnofeathers @157,
Dunno about a major highlight of my life, but it’s pretty cool to see RD on the thread.
Chris @165:
Please, don’t pick it up again. Go and believe your stuff and leave us alone. Or go to a de-conversion blog and argue there.
SteveC at #19: “Evolution is the ONLY explanation for the existence of life on this planet.”
Not quite. Evolution is the best explanation of the range and variety of life forms. Chemistry is the best explanation of the existence of life in the first place.
(But if you want to say that biology is just a part of chemistry, which is just a part of physics, I won’t argue too hard.)
#160, Scrofulum | August 7, 2008 6:45 AM,
I don’t know anybody in my social circles (which are quite varied) who wasn’t a bit surprised by the religious kids in the programme. You just don’t expect anyone with an enquiring mind (and 16 year-olds have that in abundance) to be quite so taken in by their parents wishy-washy crap. Where’s a spot of healthy teenage rebellion when you need it?
When religions are in the minority, opposing mainstream teaching (evolution) in the name of religion is a form of rebellion.
Moreover Muslims, a tiny minority still in the UK, are taught that the penalty for disbelief is being cast into hell at the final judgement. To be an observant Muslim is quite difficult, involving five prayers a day and constant washing, so if you reject that because of something a teacher tells you it’s throwing away a high investment with the prospect of a huge penalty if you get it wrong.
So often they are not thinking rationally because the perceived penalties for doing so are so high.
Many birds with one stone:
Steve LaBonne @ 166:
Thanks for that link! Looking forward to reading it…
wowbagger @ 167:
Yes: I always liked the old saying, “science is a verb.”
Sigmund @ 168:
Great example!
Don Cox @ 172:
Like this…?
Jim Harrison@110,
Rudwick sounds well worth reading, but what does he have to say about the disputes in the 1820s (IIRC) about the “universal deluge” AKA Noah’s flood? Sedgwick and others claimed there was good evidence for this, but later changed their minds as the science progressed. did they accept an old Earth, but nonetheless believe most of Genesis was historical?
@ cactusren #107
Historically, evolution was a fact, recognised in the geological record by the scientific community, long before there was also a Theory Of Evolution able to explain the fact of evolution. Evolution remains both a fact and a theory. It’s the theory which is the clever part though (apart from to creationists who are too stupid or dishonest to know people don’t get to have their own facts or to recognise that facts don’t get you very far without a valid theory from which falsifiable predictions can be made).
Chris wrote: I believe in Science for the most part because we can not only back it up with evidence but because we can produce the same results every time based on many paths. However, evolution is not the same as every other form of science. You have to prove something that happened before you were around and that is not easy to do.
*broken record mode on*
A. It’s not like evolution doesn’t happen now.
B. Science isn’t in the business of proving things. You’re thinking about it all wrong.
*broken record mode off*
Pete wrote: …especially when you have PZ presenting himself as the goody, goody tenured professor out to discover scientific truths…
*broken record mode on*
PZ isn’t out to discover scientific truths. Science doesn’t reveal truth; science is asymptotic to truth. You’re thinking about it wrong.
*broken record mode off*
I suspect that one of Dawkins’ key messages here is that the problem of religion getting in the way of science education is not just a US phenomenon.
How can you possibly teach science in the allocated time frame, if the students have years of indoctrination saying that science is a pack of lies, evil and wrong? What if some students are ready to learn, and half the class are simply not able to even bear to listen?
@ Chris #150
That’s because you don’t have any new ideas. You’re misrepresenting old and discredited ideas as being new.
Chris, I do hope you return, but this time to engage in the well argued points made, non-aggressively I might add, for evolution by people here. Just because you don’t understand a concept doesn’t make it untrue. And you can continue to believe that “God did it…ALL”, but the point is there is no evidence this is so. Arguing God is outside the boundaries of what we can understand and perceive begs the question of how you can know he exists and did anything at all. But I think you really should do yourself a favour and look back over some of the responses you received.
#172. You reminded me – “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” Ernest Rutherford.
To try to reason with believers is as useless an activity as carrying coals to Newcastle.
@Tony Sidaway (#132) et al:
I think I can resolve this – the programme itself identified this scene as being at Tring. Admittdly that’s an argument from authority, rather than reliant upon analysis of the evidence, but…
(BTW – didn’t you used to be a regular at Skeptics in the Pub, Tony?)
Steve: I think the first thing you should do is make it clear in your own mind whether you are posting here 1) to ask questions and learn what we think, or 2) to tell us we’re all wrong. If it’s 1) then fine, pull up a chair and let’s talk. If however, you merely want to state your case and not listen to the arguments against them, then you will not be treated very politely, I’m afraid.
… against it, dammit (before anybody pulls me up on my grammar!)
After watching this, I wonder: how many people, in perhaps the centuries before Darwin, happened upon theories similar to evolution by natural selection but chose not to publish due to religious pressure?
Jim Harrison (Comment #27):
The claim that Darwin was one of the first people to recognise that fossils were the remains of extinct organisms was particularly cringeworthy. As if this hadn’t been widely recognised amongst scientists since the mid-18th Century and earlier (Leonardo da Vinci springs to mind).
MAJeff (Comment #50):
Absolutely. While it was kind of nice that one or two of the more religious students seemed to be thinking “Yeah, this could be true after all”, one wonders how long this newfound open-mindedness is likely to last. It’s not as if the family and social pressures acting on them to conform to fundamentalist orthodoxy are suddenly going to abate. But the student who mentioned that while he already “believed in” [sic] evolution (presumably more or less by default), he now wanted to find out more, was a hopeful sign.
Still, the whole “let’s take a bunch of 15-16 year olds and show them the evidence for evolution” was completely mishandled, especially since it seemed to amount to no more than a fossil-hunting trip and a brief lecture on DNA. There were all manner of field trips, demonstrations and illustrations that could have been employed which would have been educational not just for the students themselves, but also for the audience (for instance, I’m sure the NHM in London could have provided a transitional sequence or two of fossil specimens if asked, and some easily understandable demonstration of how one species can split into two can’t be that hard to rustle up). As it was, it looked as if the producers of the programme wanted a reality TV/human interest angle just for the sake of it, but lacked the budget or the imagination to do anything useful or informative with it.
This seem pretty good (and made me late for work) but I got slightly irritated by the focus on animals in the footage and commentary. Evolution applies to plants too.
The phrasing, I felt, gave the sense that evolution only related to animals.
Not the intention, I’m sure, but the word animal seemed to get used when the word organism would have been better.
@cactusren you say “Dawkins refers to evolution as a “fact”. While I don’t doubt evolution, I don’t like using this term for it”
I understand your point. However, it it often stated that evolution itself is a fact and the theory of evolution is the explanation of the evidence that points to the fact of evolution. Don’t you think that this is so?
Chris (Comment #137):
So God is a form of electromagnetic radiation?
Wrong way round – genes are in the “code”, not vice versa. They’re not something independent of the nucleotide sequence.
The consequence of this is that all modern species should be represented more or less continually in the fossil record. But they aren’t. Species disappear from the record and new species appear, and modern species appear only recently. If they’ve existed from the beginning, why do they only start to get preserved in the most recent strata?
And how exactly does God prevent one species from evolving from another?
Yes, you can. A hypothesis about past events and processes can be tested if it makes predictions about the observations we can make here and now.
@ #118 Iain Walker et al.,
While Leonardo di Vinci and others did recognize that fossils were the remains of once living individuals, they did not recognize that fossils were the remains of extinct species (that is, species which are no longer in the world today). That discovery would not be made until the late 18th Century and the work of Cuvier, Buffon, and their colleagues, and was contraversial at the time.
Also, while many people did recognize that fossils were the remains of once living animals, this was not universally believed by the natural philosophers. Some considered fossils to be “sports of Nature” (i.e., rocks that happened to look like rocks), or the work of the divine “vital force” that had incompletely created animals (incomplete spontaneous generation). One of Steno’s primary contributions was the demonstration that fossils were indeed simply the remains of once living organisms incorporated into sedimentary rock.
I really enjoyed this video. I did cringe a bit at the beginning when Dawkins attributes natural selection only to Darwin. I would liked to have seen Alfred Russel Wallace at least mentioned.
I understand your point. However, it it often stated that evolution itself is a fact and the theory of evolution is the explanation of the evidence that points to the fact of evolution. Don’t you think that this is so?
It would probably be better if we didn’t shorthand it as much–that might help in the clarification (I doubt it, but maybe).
It’s a scientific fact (i.e., an observation with associated error) that organisms have changed over time. We observe a steady progression of change over geologic time in the remains of organisms preserved in the rock record. What we refer to as the theory of evolution explains this observation (as theories are want to do).
Perhaps even this is shorthanding things too much since it only addresses the fossil evidence and broadbrushes the many facets of the theory.
‘Evolution’ can mean both change over time (as in the evolution of the car or the evolution of the industrial society) and as such is pretty much accepted as fact by everyone. Its clear that the environment is changing all the time and there are plenty of examples of species that were once plentiful and are now extinct. Even the worst branches of creationism accept this as a fact.
‘Evolution’ also refers to a theoretical mechanism that drives the change in biology such as Natural Selection (or previously Lamarckism).
Thus it is both a fact and a theory. Carl Sagan also described it as both a fact and a theory in his Cosmos series.
Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. (Comment #193):
You’re right, and I mis-spoke (mis-wrote?) – much as I realised soon after posting. D’oh.
The claim in the programme was that Darwin was one of the first to recognise that fossils were the remains of once living organisms (i.e., not specifically those of extinct species). This had been broadly recognised amongst scientists since the mid-18th century, although as you rightly point out, the idea that fossils represented extinct biota took longer to be accepted (e.g., think of Jefferson’s hope that the Lewis and Clark expedition would find living mammoths).
So the criticism of the programme for historical inaccuracy on this point still stands.
What a wonderful video. I remember my biology teachers in high school playing similar things but never touched on the religious aspect. It just really never came up, though I wish someone would’ve challenged our thinking and blind acceptance a little more. It would be fantastic to see this air in the US on a major network. Perhaps it would stimulate some thought in the masses. But then… I suppose the idea of people getting off their knees and thinking for 2 minutes together might frighten some parts of society.
And beer.
The date is so wildly wrong it would be hilarious.
1. The Asians were occupying the Americas starting around 14,000 years ago.
2. Australia was being colonized around 50,000 years ago.
3. The oldest living being on earth is a clump of spruce trees in Sweden that is 9550 years old.
The YECs must have to studiously avoid all modern media to avoid yet another fact in an endless series that screams Old Earth and Older universe.
Must not look up much either. To anyone with minimal education the earth just looks old. Mountains erode, rivers run in valleys with cliffs, ice age debris litters the northern USA along with glacial lakes, coast lines erode, fossils are common in many places, we run out civilization on fossil fuels like coal and petroleum that are tens to hundreds of millions of years old.
Not surprising, 20% of the US population still thinks the sun orbits the earth. Every day must be a, “lets put the real world in the ‘Do not look at’ box.”
3. The oldest living being on earth is a clump of spruce trees in Sweden that is 9550 years old.
This is tangential to something I’ve been trying to hunt down for some time. Does anyone have hard intel on how far back the oldest set of continuous tree rings goes? That is to say, what’s the longest continuous set of rings we have that has a hard death date?
#189
How was it mishandled? He asked them blunt, honest questions that they probably have never been asked, such as “why do you believe something for which there is no evidence?” and “do you just believe the first thing you are taught and disregard anything that contradicts that?”. He asked them to think for themselves and question what they are told.
Kids go on many field trips and after a while, they all start blending together. Not often enough are they engaged in an honest, unsugared conversation where they are asked questions that require thinking hard about the answer. And he wasn’t objecting to their beliefs outright (this is to #13), he was simply asking them why they believed what they beleive.
I do not understand why kids are treated as such mentally incapable and fragile things that no one dare pose challenges to (at least here in the USA). No, they shouldn’t be mistreated or scoffed at or made to feel inferior for any reason, but it’s not going to hurt them to be asked an honest question to which they are required to provide an honest answer. There should be no fear that little Johnny might have to strain his brain to answer a difficult question.
“That is to say, what’s the longest continuous set of rings we have that has a hard death date?”
I think most older dentritic dating uses combinations of tree trunks to extend the time backwards.
It doesn’t make a difference to the creationists anyway. They claim that the seasons were different in olden days so the extra rings that extend the supposed creation date were caused by several ring growths in the same year for instance. Thats the beauty of believing in magic. Absolutely every possible piece of contradictory evidence has a magical alternative!
Radioisotopes decayed at a different rate in biblical times, the speed of light was different back then, the moon and the sun were in different places, the continents looked different then, mountains were much shorter etc.
C’mon. Your “new idea” dates back thousands of years. It was suspected to be wrong 1600 years ago and given up completely by anyone educated a century ago. We’ve heard it on a daily basis anytime we log in to a biology blog or some fundie Death Cultists try to take over a school board.
You must be about 12 years old. It is great to be young but really, a whole lot of stuff happened before you were born. Gasoline used to be 32 cents/gallon, PCs didn’t exist, TV was in black and white, the USA wasn’t always at war, and on and on.
I think most older dentritic dating uses combinations of tree trunks to extend the time backwards.
That’s what I keep finding…
As to the rest of your comment: I know I know, but if we don’t keep fighting it, it’s over. In the broad sense, this isn’t about evolution. That’s merely a symptom. I’m sure you understand the implications of having critical thinking skills continue to erode. Surrender achieves nothing.
Sadly over-hyped. What the Swedes have is a few hundred years old spruce bush with some 9550 years old spruce remains under it. They may or may not come from the same clone. There are older plant clones in the world even if it is the same individual.
The oldest anchored tree ring series extends back 10,000 years.
At some point, excuses turn into outright lies. That is the downside of believing unbelievable stuff. You end up spending your entire life lying about reality. “We lie a lot so god must exist.” Not exactly a sensible viewpoint.
Snitzels (Comment #201):
By coming nowhere near to living up to the promise (i.e., showing them the evidence for evolution), and by contributing bugger all to the content of the programme.
And then ended up just telling them things … (I’m sorry, but a single ammonite on its own is not evidence for anything, except ammonites).
Whatever positive lessons the students may have learned as individuals, the segments that included them added nothing to the programme (except possibly to underline the fact that a fundamentalist upbringing hinders scientific understanding). Like I said, Dawkins and the programme makers could have taken them on a tour of various strands of the evidence for evolution (the stated intention of their inclusion in the programme), and used their presence in the programme to illuminate said evidence for the audience. But they didn’t. At best this was a missed opportunity, at worst cheap and sloppy programme making.
As you can probably gather, I thought the programme was dumbed down and carelessly made.
Fortunately, the word is that the next programme (in which Dawkins bashes Social Darwinism and discusses the evolution of altruism) is much, much better. I hope so, anyway.
I completely agree. But that’s also completely unrelated to the point I was making.
Hyped maybe but not sure if it is overhyped. The article I read yesterday claims that they genetically typed the dead wood and the clump seems to be a series of clones growing up from root suckers.
As to plant clump clones. They are common in some species leading to claims that a forest of aspens is actually the largest living thing because they all grew from root suckers and so on. IIRC, there is a bush grove in Tasmania that is the last individual of an entire species that has been growing from suckers for who knows how long. The Wollemi pine may be similar.
The spruce article has the advantage of being current, it is 2008 and readily accessible. The cutoff for old clones is most likely the last ice age except in lower latitude areas.
I’m also among those who thought the programme was poorly made (for quite a lot of reasons, many already mentioned by others above and, contradictorily, being some of the same things other people found good!). Perhaps the US(?) people cheering it on have had their standards set entirely too low by their usual home-grown offerings.
Referring to some notes I made a few years ago on old trees etc:
“Earth’s oldest living inhabitant, a bristlecone pine called “Methuselah” at 4,767 years, has lived more than a millennium longer than any other tree.”
“Bragging rights for the oldest living thing on Earth may go to a creosote bush found in 1980 in the desert outside Palm Springs. It’s believed to be 11,700 years old.”
I vaguely recall the Australians had some sort of a swamp beastie in contention – a mangrove perhaps.
I watched this programme when it was broadcast and was impressed with it.
I’ve written up a short review of the first installment at my blog.
Yes, but the article seems to be wrong, no report or publication of these genetic results can be found, which is very suspicious since extracting DNA from this kind of subfossil material would be quite a feat. The Swedish press release from Umeå university does not say that they genotyped anything, they assume it’s the same genetic individual because it’s growing in the same spot.
Jim Harrison @ 110 – your post is an example of what’s called revisionist history, in the best sense.
My sketch of the early scientific understanding of geochronology probably came in large part from Stephen Jay Gould, whom I concede is hardly definitive, but which also seems to reflect “conventional wisdom” as given in (too-brief) discussion of Lyell’s debates with catastrophists in a few intro-geology texts on my shelves.
That said, you offer specific and respectable-sounding new studies, so now I have to consider what I’d thought was established as tentative at best. Damnit, even the past won’t stay settled – you’d think this history stuff was like science or something!
True, a single ammonite isn’t really evidence of much, except that it was there a long time ago. But I do believe the point he was trying to make was that it was something tangible, which is 100% more evidence than they have for believing the contradictory idea that a god created everything.
One thing that did bother me was that after he just “told them things” and encouraged them to question authority, they still didn’t really question the things he told them. (or it was edited for time if they did)
Perhaps taking them to the genome lab would’ve been more instructive, but a bit over their heads. As it was he only had a brief time with them and I think it was breaking the idea down into digestible ideas that would get through quickly and spark a little curiosity so they’d do more questioning of their own. But we’ll have to probably agree to disagree there. I see your point, but I can see why they did it that way.
Perhaps to handle an audience that is a bit dumbed down and carelessly educated…
That was more aimed at #13, not so much you ;) I do so enjoy my soapbox, I couldn’t help myself.
I need to start reading the new posts on the homepage either earlier in the morning or from the bottom of the page up.
Nick Gotts #175 asked whether geologists around 1820 thought they had found evidence of the Biblical flood. The full answer to that question is pretty complex, though people like Sedgwick and Buckland always kept the science and the theology separate. Thing was, once the geologists began to correlate formations across western Europe, they gradually become able to figure out which strata were relatively more recent and which older. In the process, they found evidence for very dramatic and widespread changes that obviously occurred near the top of the geological column. With the advantage of hindsight, we know that what they observed were the vestiges of the Ice Ages. They thought they were looking at the result of enormous floods, perhaps floods dimly remembered in the form of the Noah story. The geologists soon realized that the events in question, though relatively recent, were still considerably older than 6,000 years and also that there had been more than one episode of change. In the 1830s, observations of contemporary glaciers led to a better understanding of how such phenomena as u-shaped valleys, erratic boulders, and grooved rocks could result from ice. The history of science, like the history of life, has a lot of twists and turns!
Hmmm, well I see your point. I would expect if they have ancient DNA data, they would publish it. DNA much older than that has been sequenced, Neanderthal and so on. And the location is favorable for preserving old DNA, i.e. cold. I have zero idea how hard it is to extract old DNA from old wood.
From the picture, the spruce tree is growing in the middle of a rock field at the edge of the vegetation line. With no other trees around it. They might have assumed since it is a clump that it is a clone. Not enough info to tell exactly what is going on with this PR.
OTOH, sciencedaily wouldn’t make stuff up, would they? I assume they talked to the investigators themselves and publication lags results.
Wait and see. At any rate, it has negligible bearing on whether the earth is 6,000 years old or not. That stopped being a viable theory a few centuries ago.
Personally I greatly prefer http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html
. I am however already an atheist, as well as already have a sense of awe and happiness at how amazing life really is.
Snitzels (Comment #214):
That’s a fair point – I did some occasional and highly haphazard fossil collecting myself as a teenager, and there’s nothing quite like being able to hold in your hand a tangible relic of now vanished biota. One might even be tempted to use the term “transcendental experience” to describe it. Ah, happy days …
But still, great as it may have been for the students (I imagine that a free field trip may have had something to do with their agreement to participate), it still adds precious little to the educational content of the programme itself. If the kids themselves learned something, then I’m all for Dawkins taking them on their little excursion. That’s a worthwhile and honourable end in itself. But unless the audience is going to learn something from it, I see no point in including it in the finished programme.
Precisely. If it was to be done properly, the promise of showing them the evidence needed something like a full programme devoted to it. If the programme makers weren’t prepared to deliver on that promise, they shouldn’t have bothered with those segments in the first place. It’s not as if there’s a lack of material for illustrating the power of Darwin’s idea, or his genius as a scientist, so the programme didn’t need to be padded. For instance, we could have had orchid-pollinating moths as an additional example of an evolutionary arms race, to balance the stereotypical “nature red in tooth and claw” wildlife porn (and also to give a neat illustration of Darwin using his theory to make predictions that were subsequently borne out).
Indeed – the TV producer’s eternal quest for “human interest”, irrespective of whether or not it adds anything to the programme. To paraphrase Hitchens: Reality TV poisons everything …
Which doesn’t excuse (for example) the historical inaccuracies and over-simplifications noted earlier in the thread. As Dawkins says, evolution by natural selection isn’t that complex a notion. You don’t need to dumb it down as much as he (or the producers) did.
Anyway, that’s enough curmudgeonliness from me. Hopefully I’ll be singing the praises of next week’s programme, if it lives up to its previews.
To those of you who responded to my post about fact vs. theory terminology, thanks! I have little else to say about it, but am contemplating all your input.
Chris,
Clearly, you have a reasonably open mind to this, but don’t yet understand how evolution works. I hope that you will continue to come here to learn more, or perhaps read some books on evolution.
As to your belief in micro-, but not macroevolution, this is misguided–new species certainly don’t appear magically. Here is one example of how speciation can occur. There is phenomenon called a ring species, which is best represented by a type of salamander in California and Oregon known as Ensatina eschscholtzii. This consists of several subspecies, whose populations form a ring around the San Joaquin valley (the salamanders live at a higher altitude than the valley floor, hence forming a ring around it). Each subspecies can interbreed with the the subspecies that live adjacent to it, so they must belong to the same species. However, at the southern end of this loop, the two endmembers cannot interbreed (and were originally named as separate species, as they look quite different). So, if any one of the subspecies in the middle of this loop were to go extinct, then there would be two separate populations that could not interbreed, and voila! you have two distinct species. There is a more complete explaination of this in the textbook “Evolution” by Mark Ridley (and probably in most other evolution textbooks). If you are really interested in understanding the evidence for evolution, I highly recommend that you read one of these. If you still want to believe God had a hand in all this, you are perfectly welcome to hold that belief. But please, don’t let your belief in God dictate how you interpret scientific evidence.
Jim Harrison@216,
Thanks very much.
#216:
Including, for example, the fact that one of the most energetic proponents of the ice-age theory was Louis Agassiz – who was also one of Darwin’s most implacable opponents.
#184 @Robin Levett | August 7, 2008 9:15 AM
BTW – didn’t you used to be a regular at Skeptics in the Pub, Tony?
That was me. tonysidaway@gmail.com
My apologies for my profane insult to petey. It was a moment of anger let loose. I don’t want to offend anyone here. I still think petey is an idiot bit I did go too far. I’ll go was my mouth out now.
Yet another masterpiece from the master story teller.
His explanations like the following make me wonder Is Richard Dawkins an unintentional buddhist ?
“The total amount suffering in the natural world …is beyond all decent human contemplation…
During the minute it takes (me) to say these words, thousands of animals
are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, feeling teeth sinking to their throats. Thousands are dying from starvation, or decease, or feeling a parasite rasping away from within. There is no central authority, no safety net.
For most animals reality of life is struggling, suffering, and death….”
Furthermore his elucidation of similarities – in biological terms – between humans and other species which brings to my mind what the Buddha taught..
pemma,
How coherent is Buddhism without the notion of a separable soul (or whatever) that gets reincarnated? Because I’m sure Dawkins, like me and I would think practically all who would describe themselves as atheists, finds that idea completely implausible.
@ Tony #105:
No, unfortunately. My guess is his unequivocal stance on religion precludes showing his work on U.S. TV – TV producers might feel he would launch the American Pious into froth-at-mouth-attack-advertisers mode. Although maybe Showtime might have the guts to carry one of RD’s programs at some point in time….
Theres a rather amazing comment by Richard Dawkins on his site about the various atheist statements in the program. Quite a lot of people have pointed out that they seemed unnecessary in such a program and this is his response.
“Thank you, but I have to admit that this, and other honest statements of atheism, were thrust upon me, against my will (especially right at the beginning of Episode 1), not by the Director or the television company, but by the LAWYER! That sounds weird. It isn’t strictly a legal worry, but a worry about satisfying Ofcom, the regulatory body that controls British television. I don’t fully understand it, but I THINK it has something to do with the need to ‘respect’ creationists. The lawyer thought that Ofcom would have preferred me to present ‘both sides’. Because I obviously wasn’t going to do that, he thought the next best thing was to be completely up front and announce, in advance, that the reason I took the line I did was that I was an atheist.
Of course, I don’t like the sound of that at all. I’d prefer to say I’m an evolutionist because the evidence is so convincing. It is as though the lawyer has been infected by the ‘all opinions are equally valid’ viewpoint. So it’s OK to promote evolution rather than creation, so long as I announce, IN ADVANCE that I am an atheist.”
Buddhist thought denies the existence of a separable soul. In fact, the Indians traditionally classified Buddhism as one of the anatman, i.e. , no atman, no-soul, doctrines. English-speaking Buddhists are usually careful to insist that they believe in rebirth, not reincarnation. On their view, there is nothing in a person that will be separated out at death and placed in a new body. Instead, what individuals do now has causal (karmic) consequences that will result in a new sentient life form appearing in the future. Imagine a room in which a slightly over-sized rug has been installed. A wrinkle in the rug can move around and therefore appears rather thing-like, but it has no substance.
As Iain Walker notes it was Louis Agassiz who helped popularise that theory. One of his opponents for a long time was Charles Lyell. Agassiz kept amassing evidence and eventually Lyell was forced to change his mind, as he did about aspects of evolution.
But the soil is probably also acidic, which is bad for DNA preservation. The material is not really wood but mushy decomposed plant material (there was a pic in a Swedish brochure which I can’t find right now).
Remember when ScienceDaily informed us that the platypus was “part bird, part reptile, part mammal”? :P Beware of press releases and science journalism…
Of course, but it still seems that there is a lot of misinformation around about this particular study. I have now emailed the author to ask.
Jim Harrison@229,
How does that fit with Tibetan Buddhists’ ideas (at least, as filtered through western books and media) about finding e.g. the new Dalai Lama? Is that a western misinterpretation? Or a deviation from the original Buddhist doctrine, supposing there to have been such a thing? Is this “karmic connection” supposed to be one-to-one – i.e., such that there is a specific past individual whose actions caused each present individual (and only that present individual) to be born?
Ah. While we’re briefly on the subject of Buddhism, I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this – “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism”:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php
SC@233,
Um. Frankly, I found it practically unreadable, extremely pretentious, and pretty near devoid of content.
Frankly, I found it practically unreadable, extremely pretentious,
Well, it’s by Zizek. That’s a given.
and pretty near devoid of content.
Nah. Anyway, I wasn’t praising it – just wanted to hear others’ thoughts.
Well, it’s by Zizek. That’s a given
*giggle/snort*
Just don’t give ’em any Butler. (I’ve been ready, on several occasions, to fly out to Berkeley and beat her with her own books.)
I’m not familiar with Zizek – I may have missed the content because my reaction to that sort of stuff is more visceral than cerebral!
Derek Wall, one of the prominent figures in the England and Wales Green Party, describes himself as both a Marxist and a Buddhist. How far he actually understands either -ism, I couldn’t say.
(I’ve been ready, on several occasions, to fly out to Berkeley and beat her with her own books.)
Now I’m compiling a mental list of people I fantasize about book-smacking…Several in France come to mind…
Several in France come to mind…
Well, yeah. Anyone working in French psychoanalytic theory goes to the top of the list.
But, if you say my boys Michel or Pierre, I’m coming after you….
I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this
Besides making my eyes glaze over, it reminds me of Razib’s parodies.
What do you think about this article about Tibet and Buddhism?
But, if you say my boys Michel or Pierre, I’m coming after you….
If you knew who my mentor was, you’d know how hard I laughed reading that. Fear not. :)
Besides making my eyes glaze over,
Ha! Wimps! See how far you can get through this critique
http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/zizeks-western-buddhism-redux/
before wanting to put a pickaxe through your head.
(I’m going to read the piece you linked to now.)
(By the way, am I the only one who finds Gene Expression creepy? Am I misreading it? Am I missing something?)
If you knew who my mentor was, you’d know how hard I laughed reading that. Fear not. :)
If you say Rabinow or Dreyfus, I’m gonna kill you now!
:-)
If you say Rabinow or Dreyfus, I’m gonna kill you now!
Google “[my name] sociology” to find my grad department. Then look for the most probable (and esteemed) faculty member. He’s awesome, by the way.
What do you think about this article about Tibet and Buddhism?
That’s very depressing (in a strange way, I think the Zizek piece provides an interesting complement). I wish I knew enough about Tibet to read it critically enough. I also wish I knew anything about the history of anarchism there, if such exists/existed. There’s a growing body of work on Chinese anarchism, but not Tibetan, as far as I know.
P.S. MAJeff, are you watching?
P.S. MAJeff, are you watching?
It has to be Josh or Katie.
Google “[my name] sociology” to find my grad department. Then look for the most probable (and esteemed) faculty member. He’s awesome, by the way.
Are you talking Greenberg? I hate you more than Helms. (And Stacey?!?!?!?!?!)
If that school had offered me more than $4k per year….
….making due…. *slouched*
…and Gev (or Chris) wouldn’t know what hit him….
Are you talking Greenberg? I hate you more than Helms. (And Stacey?!?!?!?!?!)
You seem confused. :) I just emailed you the name.
….making due…. *slouched*
If it helps, I got probably the best fellowship there is, and I still owe quite a bit.
It has to be Josh or Katie.
I’m amazed that I like all four finalists. Would be thrilled to see either of them win.
You seem confused. :)
très confus
Assuming that you are talking about the regular posts about human genetics and skin color and whatnot, not the fake islamic ones …I guess it is sort of creepy, but interesting ;)
Ultramegasuperhotpinkcheese.
Mia Michaels looks good.
Oh yeah, Katie. Gotta be Katie.
I just think Katie and Joshua were magic together. but yeah, Katie has mad skillz (and that Bollywood costume and dance? Stunning)
Yeah, I kind of suspected (especially since Sabra won last year). Twitch? He is great. As an individual, better than Josh. An artist.
I think Twitch will win now. Katee was the best dancer, by quite a stretch. I just love Josh’s personality. But Twitch will, I think, win it now.
(I also adored the blonde who got voted off last week. That young woman’s skills–and legs–in Latin dancing were amazing, and I have a weakness for Latin Ballroom.)
Oh, goody. The Jonas Brothers….when they were on American Idol, I had to text a friend and ask who they were. I guess not being a 12-yo girl leaves me out of the loop.
OK, I guess we should stop dominating a Darwin thread with So You Think You Can Dance play-by-play…
:-)
Chelsie – she won me over, too.
Ugh. Lame. Have they ever had a good musical guest?
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | August 7, 2008 9:36 PM
Posted by: SC | August 7, 2008 9:36 PM
:).
OK, I guess we should stop dominating a Darwin thread with So You Think You Can Dance play-by-play…
Eh, I guess. But no one seemed particularly keen on discussing Marxism and Buddhism, either!
Eh, I guess. But no one seemed particularly keen on discussing Marxism and Buddhism, either!
I know. I never got dance. There was a scene in Almodóvar’s Hable con ella, near the beginning, where one of the protagonists was crying at a dance recital. Never got it. Dance was never able to move me like that. (music on the other hand….)
There have been one or two performances that almost got me there (this is the first season I’ve watched the show). I’ve never even been entertained by dance like I have this season. Sure, I’ve loved to go out dancing, to move and to help me release pain, joy, ecstasy, whatever…but watching? Not until now.
Just as it is far from easy to nail down what counts as Christianity, it’s pretty hard to come up with generalities about Buddhism that hold in every time and place. That said, I’m not aware of any variety of the religion that doesn’t at least pay lip service to the nonexistence of the self. Which doesn’t mean that Buddhists don’t believe in the continuity of consciousness in a single person; they simply understand identity as the product of an unbroken series of causal connections rather than as a reflection of an enduring something separate from the bits and pieces of experience. Some Buddhist writings are reminiscent of Hume, as many commentators have pointed out.
Note that there is a moral message in the no-self doctrine. As some verses in the Dhammapada express it:
When through wisdom one perceives,
“All things are without self.”
Then one is detached from misery.
This is the path of purity. (20.7)
Religions aren’t in the philosophy business.
they simply understand identity as the product of an unbroken series of causal connections rather than as a reflection of an enduring something separate from the bits and pieces of experience
sort of like post-structuralism, but replacing “bits and pieces of experience” for social relationships, settings, contexts, and interactions??
Holy fuck, josh won!
I know. [?] I never got dance.
I’m the opposite. Growing up, this show would have been my dream. Had I a different childhood with different opportunities, I would probably be a dancer/choreographer now (and a scholar – I’m very complicated :)). I lived for Soul Train, Fame,…, made my parents take me to see the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders at the Big E… In my twenties, I went out dancing every night. Lived for it. I would still go to dance class every day if I could afford it. Too bad I’m so old now. Sigh.
Wow – Joshua. I’m surprised, but good for him.
Wait, we’re talking about SYTYCD now? I wonder if PZ’s getting that ‘I sense a disturbance in the force’ feeling…
Had I a different childhood with different opportunities, I would probably be a dancer/choreographer now (and a scholar – I’m very complicated :))
Complication is good.
I have a BA in music. Hearing Mahler’s first at the Concertgebouw is one of the top three or four moments in my life. And yet, give me Whitney Houston–in her crack-whore mode–on the dance floor and I can almost reach a similar point of catharsis, of destruction of the self in the moment. I’ve just never “gotten it” while watching. Reminds me of the the first real haiku I wrote:
I understood jazz
when I got stoned and listened
to Alice Coltrane
I was talking with some folks about the Concertgebouw thing a few years ago. I refuse to give the affect a name, I refuse to organize it into an emotion. I don’t want to do that kind of violence to the moment. One of my former students was like, “you’re full of it, Jeff.” and my MA advisor–who was a colleague at the time– was like, “nope. I know jeff. He’s not bullshitting you.” It was beyond language and I want to keep it there.
—-
Yay Josh.
Wait, we’re talking about SYTYCD now? I wonder if PZ’s getting that ‘I sense a disturbance in the force’ feeling…
And he’s barely gone! For her own sake, I hope Brenda von Freakout doesn’t pick this month to make a return…
I just read this book that tries to draw parallels between all the major religions and how they relate to the self, empathy, mysticism and so on: The Great Transformation. It was not at all convincing. This review brings up many of the same points I came up with while reading it.
(Haven’t seen the dance show, so I had to go all boring and talk about books. ;)
I have a BA in music.
I didn’t know that. Mine’s in art history (that’s come up a lot here lately, for some reason…).
I’ve just never “gotten it” while watching.
It’s hard for me: on the one hand, I enjoy it tremendously; on the other, I want to be doing it myself. Hard to sit still and watch.
Reminds me of the the first real haiku I wrote:
Yay haikus. Yay that haiku. I’ve had a thing for Django Reinhardt (and Eastern-European, gypsy music) these past few years. Just thought I’d share. :)
I just read this book that tries to draw parallels between all the major religions and how they relate to the self, empathy, mysticism and so on: The Great Transformation.
and here I thought you were talking Polanyi…until I clicked the link.
It’s hard for me: on the one hand, I enjoy it tremendously; on the other, I want to be doing it myself. Hard to sit still and watch
That’s me at the symphony. I’m a very restless listener.
As I said in my guest blogging post…I revel in being an emotional being.
The Great Transformation. It was not at all convincing.
And Karl Polanyi already claimed that title for a good book. :)
and here I thought you were talking Polanyi…until I clicked the link.
Yep, the choice of title wasn’t that great either…
and here I thought you were talking Polanyi…until I clicked the link.
Hey! Stop preempting me!
As I said in my guest blogging post…I revel in being an emotional being.
Oh, great. I was so caught up with SYTYCD and other nonsense I didn’t even notice all of the new posts. Whenever am I going to pack?
Good for you!
Whenever am I going to pack?
A half-hour before your cab to the airport arrives, just like everyone else :-)
A half-hour before your walk to the T to the bus station, just like everyone else :-S
A half-hour before your walk to the T to the bus station, just like everyone else :-S
I hope your bus is in the morning…otherwise you’re screwed.
I hope your bus is in the morning…otherwise you’re screwed.
Why – is there something going on? Or just because it’s a Friday afternoon (which I hadn’t really given sufficient consideration, truth be told)? I’m so out of the loop. I probably should take a morning one, now that I think about it…
Got an e-ticket for the morning. Thx.
Why – is there something going on? Or just because it’s a Friday afternoon (which I hadn’t really given sufficient consideration, truth be told)? I’m so out of the loop. I probably should take a morning one, now that I think about it…
I sort of thought you were considering a bus last night, when they were about ready to stop running. I forgot yesterday was still Thursday :)
[quote]: Posted by: Nick Gotts | August 7, 2008 4:53 PM
pemma,
How coherent is Buddhism without the notion of a separable soul (or whatever) that gets reincarnated? .. I would think practically all who would describe themselves as atheists, finds that idea completely implausible. [/unquote]
Nick,
Buddhism is much more complex than that. It does not talk about soul – in fact “no-soul” or “anatta” is a one of Buddhism’s main pillars. Without a soul, in Buddhism, there is no re-incarnation either. All it talks about is cyclic nature of things or “dharmas” , cause and effect theory or “karma”. and rejects creator god(s).
As I said, Buddhism is much more complex than all these and this is not the right forum for engthy discussions. If you interested, visit the following website which has a wealth of knowledge on those topics.
http://www.lioncity.net/buddhism/index.php?
Ahh! Pigeons! Somehow watching this doesn’t seem like such a good idea on a wee bit of wine =P
But does he really need to prove his intelligence like that to 16 year olds? Seems rather condescending…
So it begins again. What is the point? And, no, I do not want to follow the link.
Too bad I’m so old now. Sigh.