Negative Impacts on Society

Which books were those?

If this is true, it's more like evolution has had a positive effect on society, no?Mark

Lets not forget there are also plenty of Feng Shui and astrology based self help books out there. You can write a self help book with any basis you like, it doesn't represent a good measure of how well accepted or how applied a field of science it is.[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 04-19-2004]

I suspect that "evolutionary psychology" (or the psychological \ mental evolution of homsap) will work it's way into mainstream psychology including clinical treatment of mental conditions, but not for the reasons feared by syamsu- Rather it will be due to the field offering a better understanding of human psychology on some basic aspects from {on-going sexual selection} to {development of language and dance from courtship \ mating displays} to {group dynamics}, thus understanding the problems better to enable better fitting treatments.Enjoy.

ribs accepted.

I guess it is revealed to me because all sorts of perversions, and temptations attach themselves to the belief that beauty is objective.Aside from that if I were to make a scientific theory about beauty, I would at once notice the unpredictablity of it of course. It seems to occur in the highly unstable nervous system. So I would guess that the "universal scientific rule for beauty" is a paced unpredictabililty tending towards uniqueness related to consciousness. Reese and Cleese seem to imply that noting unpredictability is not scientific, in accordance with Dawkins ridiculous claim in "the Blind Watchmaker" that chance is the enemy of science.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

The way the question is usually formulated is this: Should religion be put on an equal basis with evolution in public schools.Here's the real answer: Only if the religion you pick is the RIGHT one, i.e. you would need a religion which operated on something like the same intellectual level as evolutionism (so as to be comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges etc.), and the only two possible candidates would be rastafari and voodoo.In fact, rastafari would lend itself admirably to certain kinds of team teaching situations in the typical highschhool inasmuch as a teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mind for indoctrination into something as stupid as evolutionism, could walk across the hall to the rasta class for a box of spliffs...

Any chance you cared to actually debate the subject instead of taking potshots at it from the cover of non-evolution threads?I'm basically calling you out. I imagine that it's only the most base form of intellectual cowardice that keeps you out of the real debate - I doubt you could do any better at attacking evolution than you've been doing defending your gravity ideas.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves
trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic
plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both
old and new organs.Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support
any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together
with
fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.But it gets even stupider.Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution
is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any
sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find
intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

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1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be
proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the
missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed
that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was
proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't
BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the
logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could
as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner
was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her.
In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's
great for fantasies...

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2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of
genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw
Deliverance...

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3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger
groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like
requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions
of years.

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4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically
adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are
globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

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5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal
to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in
overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the
heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few
thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter,
a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and
it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out
over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into
one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the
salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house
could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale
catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)"
happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least
once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same
Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of abracadabra-Shazaam for
each creature.I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?Splifford the bat says: Always rememberA mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.

Maybe you could point me to the page in my evolution textbook that says "evolution proves that religion is wrong."Of course you can't. It's the creationists that have set up that false dictotomy. It's mind-boggling that you missed that somehow. Around here we're not impressed by folks who wave the victory flag before the battle is over, or in your case, has even begun. Evolution is as well-supported as the theory of gravity or the germ theory of disease. Don't confuse personal incredulity with evidence from mathematics, ok? Under evolution you'd be shit out of luck, because adaptation doesn't happen to individuals, it happens to populations. You're screwed but your kids and your kids' kids might have a chance.Well, I hope you had fun tearing down the gigantic strawman you erected. Maybe when you're ready to sit at the big kids table you could actually address the theory of evolution, maybe? I suggest of course that you actually open a new thread to do it. Oh, I don't know - you'd have to be an idiot of Olympian caliber to actually believe that the model you described bears any resemblance to the actual theory of evolution.

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For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

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This is false. Here is an example of the very beginnings of flight. You don't need all of the flight systems to be together before you have some useful functionality.

but if the "dialectic" is IN the vacuum (see Hume's work that either woke up Kant and/or speaks of where the "pure math" of form change in your flying case may harbor the dialectic(sic!) for anyone) then I might be able to argue your atmospher of flight as well. After I saw the African salamder with RIBS poking thru the skin naturally I was IMMEDIATELY disabused of the common notion on seeing the form of a flying lizard that it too might be thought in your squirells' frame when not fame. Provine to ask Johson how does the rat fly? failed to use ALREADY passed notion of De Vries' non-lineaon.
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All things ingood order.

Interesting post and very good.

Seriously "SUGGESTING" that this is off topic and needs to be in a separate thread. Propose One Here

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AdminAsgara
Queen of the Universe