Sorry....

Sorry, I've been a bit preoccupied with home stuff as of late and I have been ignoring you. In the coming days I will try to rectify this situation so please hold tight. To make things a little better, here is a video of Michael Shermer at the Creation Museum. Yes, there is a creation museum, and yes, I have been there. I did feel a bit dirty giving them $20 but I am a masochist and had to see it for myself. Enjoy, well.......do the best you can, don't put your head through your computer screen.

D

This is a Repost from my facebook page:

This is a good interview by Michael Shermer with Ms. Purdom at the Creation Museum. Can anyone say circular logic? Ms. Purdom uses it and thinks it's acceptable in science. She even says that there is NO reason to test a creation hypothesis.....she really said that. Does anyone really think this is a science anymore after that? There's your smoking gun right there. The bible isn't a science book, and excepting evolutionary theory DOES NOT mean that you can't believe in god. Michael Shermer mentions Ken Miller (orthodox catholic) and Francis S. Collins (evangelical christian), they along with many others have no problem with reconciling science with their belief in god. To say that you have to have either god or evolution is presenting a false dichotomy (claiming that there is only two possible answers when there are really more than two). I'm sorry, I don't mean to be on a soapbox here but this just makes my head hurt.

Why People Believe Weird Things

This is an awesome talk given by Michael Shermer on why people believe weird things. It's a shorty but a goody!

D

Only 2 Out Of 5......Really?

According to recent Pew and Gallup poll surveys (see story below), only 40% of Americans accept the theory of evolution. The only good to point thing about these results is that they are holding steady from previous years. That is also one of the bad points as well. I guess I am just glad that the numbers aren't dropping. Why is this so? My guess is:

1) People not being educated properly on the issue of evolution (We are not communicating it well enough to the public!).

2) For some, religion can't coexist with evolution. So, those with a strict literal interpretation of holy books will not accept evolution (or any other ideas/theories/facts that contradict their world view)

3) Because of number 2, the doors are open wide for those in power to misrepresent evolution (often, science in general).

4) Some people just don't care either way.

What to do? Number one is starting to get fixed. Lawrence Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, P.Z. Myers, Phil Plait, Michael Shermer and many others are now reaching out to the public to make evolution (science in general) more accessible to the public. Number two and three are a bit tougher. This is in part because you are challenging someones world view. People who are religious are very guarded about their beliefs. I think this is due to the fact that they don't just accept those ideas or beliefs and that's it. Those ideas/beliefs become apart of their identity. When this happens, challenging their ideas/beliefs quickly becomes very sticky situation. But as we have learned from history, just believing something doesn't make it right. At one time, people believed that the sun revolved around the earth, some did because the bible says it does (or at least was interpreted that way). That belief didn't change the fact that the earth revolves around the sun.

So, where do you fit in here? If you already accept the theory of evolution, are you explaining it clearly to those you converse with? Or are your religious beliefs conflicting with science? If so, they don't have to. Ken Miller (Orthodox Catholic and Cell Biologist at Brown University), Francis Collins (Evangelical Christian and former head of the human genome project), David Sloan Wilson, and others have written books on how they reconcile their personal belief in god with evolution (science). If you do fall into number two from above, have you been getting your information exclusively from Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, Ray Comfort, and so on? Try getting some accurate info from some of the folks I have listed here or go to a website like talkorigins.org (which happens to be down at the moment!! but there are others like PBS).

D

Reposted From: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,491345,00.html

A new poll released just in time for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday found that only 39 percent of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution," and just 24 percent of those who attend church weekly believe in that explanation for the development of life on Earth.

The Gallup survey, released Wednesday, found a quarter of those polled do not believe in evolution, and 36 percent said they don't have an opinion either way.

Another survey by the Pew Research Center got similar results.

The Gallup poll of 1,018 American adults found strong ties between education level and belief in the theory of evolution.

"Among those with high-school educations or less who have an opinion on Darwin's theory, more say they do not believe in evolution than say they believe in it," Gallup found. "For all other groups, and in particular those who have at least a college degree, belief is significantly higher than nonbelief."

Just 21 percent of respondents who had up to a high school level of education believe in evolution, compared with 74 percent of those with postgraduate degrees.

Frank Newport, Gallup's editor-in-chief, wrote that attitudes were shaped to an even greater degree by religion.

"Previous Gallup research shows that the rate of church attendance is fairly constant across educational groups, suggesting that this relationship is not owing to an underlying educational difference but instead reflects a direct influence of religious beliefs on belief in evolution," he said.

Among weekly churchgoers, only 24 percent said they believe in evolution, while 41 percent do not and 35 percent have no opinion.

Inversely, 55 percent of those who seldom or never attend church expressed belief in evolution, while 11 percent do not, and 34 percent have no opinion.

Darwin Misunderstood (SciAm Article)

Reposted From: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=darwin-misunderstood

A Skeptic's Take on the Public Misunderstanding of Darwin

On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday two myths persist about evolution and natural selection

By Michael Shermer

On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had been “so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public.” The source of the misunderstanding, Wallace continued, was the name itself, in that it implies “the constant watching of an intelligent ‘chooser’ like man’s selection to which you so often compare it,” and that “thought and direction are essential to the action of ‘Natural Selection.’” Wallace suggested redacting the term and adopting Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Unfortunately, that is what happened, and it led to two myths about evolution that persist today: that there is a prescient directionality to evolution and that survival depends entirely on cutthroat competitive fitness.

Contrary to the first myth, natural selection is a description of a process, not a force. No one is “selecting” organisms for survival in the benign sense of pigeon breeders selecting for desirable traits in show breeds or for extinction in the malignant sense of Nazis selecting prisoners at death camps. Natural selection is nonprescient—it cannot look forward to anticipate what changes are going to be needed for survival. When my daughter was young, I tried explaining evolution to her by using polar bears as an example of a “transitional species” between land mammals and marine mammals, but that was wrong. Polar bears are not “on their way” to becoming marine mammals. They are well adapted for their arctic environment.

Natural selection simply means that those individuals with variations better suited to their environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted. This outcome is known as “differential reproductive success.” It may be, as the second myth holds, that organisms that are bigger, stronger, faster and brutishly competitive will reproduce more successfully, but it is just as likely that organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well.

This second notion in particular makes evolution unpalatable for many people, because it covers the theory with a darkened patina reminiscent of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog” defender, promoted this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of popular essays on nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.” The myth persists. In his recent documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein linked Darwinism to Communism, Fascism and the Holocaust. Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling misread biologist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene to mean that evolution is driven solely by ruthless competition, both between corporations and within Enron, leading to his infamous “rank and yank” employee evaluation system, which resulted in massive layoffs and competitive resentment.

This view of life need not have become the dominant one. In 1902 the Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin published a rebuttal to Huxley and Spencer in his book Mutual Aid. Calling out Spencer by phrase, Kropotkin observed: “If we... ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.” Since that time science has revealed that species practice both mutual struggle and mutual aid. Darwinism, properly understood, gives us a dual disposition of selfishness and selflessness, competitiveness and cooperativeness.

Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln, who also struggled to reconcile our binary natures in his first inaugural address on the eve of the Civil War: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Darwin Misunderstood".

The Great Debate: Does God Exist (Lennox vs.Shermer)

Here is a great debate (and is the great debate!) on the existence of god. John Lennox (taking the side of theism) versus Michael Shermer (taking the side of atheism) is in my opinion one of the better god debates that I have seen. It is very even handed, both debaters are cordial and polite, they are clear and concise, and most of all there is a great sense of humor with all of the people involved. The debate is serious but everyone keeps it lighthearted enough for the audience to not go nuts.

The debate is broken up into ten parts and it runs about an hour and a half. If you are interested in the god debate, then I suggest you get yourself some popcorn and park it right here.

D

PART ONE



PART TWO



PART THREE



PART FOUR



PART FIVE



PART SIX



PART SEVEN



PART EIGHT



PART NINE



PART TEN