The Evidence for Evolution: Science Works

Perhaps the best evidence for evolution, is that the science works. Practically every day we see results from evolution leading to new things; inventions, patents, medical treatments, and fruitful new areas of research and discovery. These are all hallmarks of good science. If someone thinks evolution is wrong, then it is upon them to offer anew theory - a theory that can do everything the old theory can do AND MORE. 

MOST of us have seen numerous TV commercials advertizing medical trearments that derive from evolutionary theory. There is going to be a lot more of that in the next 20 years and beyond.

There were other theories of evolution before Darwin published "Origin, and none of these remain as more than the history of science. Darwin's theory has long since been surpassed and expanded, resulting in the Modern Synthesis. Darwin's key contribution is still an important part of that, and can be summarized in three words: "Selection Happens Naturally". Even the most ardent of evolution deniers, when asked if they agree with this simple hypothesis, say nothing, or accept it conditionally (and that's a good start.)

I rejoined one of those silly FB groups where claims "there is no evidence for evolution" appear several times a day. This prompted mr to finally write the down for future use, rather than typing it out every time. I should have done this years ago! 

*

Who needs books when we already have a dictionary?

In a recent online discussion, which began with a post about Darwin Day, and soon turned into an argument about evolution, one opponent wrote the following:

"The theory of evolution, if it were removed from the consideration of science wholly, would not register a blip if it weren't for its role as a guiding materialist philosophy for atheists and agnostics in academia."

He wrote rather more, but this was the bit I thought worthy of response. Which I did...

By this line of reasoning, because we understand electricity and magnetism then we have no need of Maxwell's Equations showing us that electricity and magnetism are same thing. We could easily do away with a lot of that complicated stuff in physics textbooks, because there is no need for it. By this line of reasoning, because we have dictionaries to tell us the meaning of words, then we may as well discard all of our books, because the ordering of those words can't tell us anything we don't already know. Stupid books! [/sarc]
Evolution is a theory that ties together everything we know from biological and medical science. Like the electromagnetic force describes what we once thought of as different forces, evolution explains why we see so much similarity among life, and guides our studies of of how life works. In the same way that books are more than just collections of random words, evolution is a meaningful collection of knowledge and the connections within it. Nothing in biology, or in medicine, make sense except in light of evolution.
As for the bit about guiding philosophy, Methodological Naturalism is not atheism. 

There were no further replies on the thread, so the person I was responding to either never saw it, or was so awed by my witty reply that they gave up in despair. I'm gonna go with the latter, and make a blog post out of it.


Here is a link to the original discussion on G+. Not that anyone needs to see it, this is for my own future reference.

Ogre versus Troll: Is Intelligent Design Anti-Evolution?

A blogging-friend, who goes by the name of Ogre MkV, is debating another blogger, JoeG, on the topic: Is Intelligent Design Anti-Evolution? Ogre's opening statement is up now at Cassandra's Tears:

Intelligent Design is Anti-evolution (Support Opening)

Having read that, I wanted to get some thoughts down before I read JoeG's response.

1) Ogre MKV makes a strong case that ID is anti-evolution by any reasonable definition. He builds a case that is it first necessary to define intelligent design and what it supports, and then goes on to cite conflicting definitions, all of which are anti-evolution.

2) Of the many people I have encountered via the internet, JoeG may well be the nastiest (thus the "Troll"). The more I think about it, the more I wonder what Ogre was thinking when he agreed to this debate. I will try to keep an open mind about what JoeG might say, but ... I've encountered him before at Uncommon Descent (where he is moderated) and his own blog (where he is vitriolic), and ... I expect more nastiness.

[ ... time passes ...]

And now I'm back from reading JoeG's opening statement, which was rather disappointing, but at least it maintained civility. The post consists primarily of long quotes of things other people (Wells, Behe, Dembski, etc.) say about ID, and winds up saying that ID has little to say about pretty much all aspects of evolutionary theory ... except the "blind watchmaker thesis". The blind watchmaker is a favorite topic that JoeG brings up often, and always as an argument against evolution. Maybe JoeG does not understand what "anti" means? (Ogre thought of that too).

Ogre MkV has cross-posted JoeG's opening statement. I can't actually recommend it, but there it is.

Evolution in Two Minutes or Less

The winner and runners up to the Discovery Magazine contest.

Selecting for kuru resistant cannibals

I'm trying to decide what to think of this. On one hand resistance to kuru it's a hopeful sign. On the other hand, the mere existence of a disease that turns you into a laughing zombie could put a damper on your next mortuary feast.

Selecting for kuru resistant cannibals
New Scientist reports on a new study on how a gene that gives protection against the deadly brain disease kuru became more common in people exposed to the condition through their cannibalistic tradition of eating the bodies of dead relatives.

Kuru is a prion disease, meaning the damage is caused by a poorly arranged or folded protein molecule which can trigger the same damaging changes in other proteins it comes into contact with.

The condition is related to what we know as 'mad cow disease' and causes a distinctive form of shaking, brain degeneration and eventually leads to death. It was restricted to the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea who seemed to pass on the condition by their tradition of to eating deceased relatives at mortuary feasts.

This new study shows that over time a new variant of the PRNP gene emerged in the population which gave protection against kuru.

Just to be safe, you might want to scratch brains-in-oyster-sauce from the Thanksgiving menu.

In Search of the Mother Troll

I was reading an article at Smithsonian.com:

Evolution in the Deepest River in the World

which I found quite interesting. What really caught my attention though was the comments. Third comment to appear was this:

evolution is a biggest HOAX in world history

... and I think the commenter might be fairly called a Creationist. I won't mince words though, this commenter is a troll. There are probably hundreds of replies now and several trolls getting batted about by smart people who seem to enjoy a good game of Whack-A-Mole. More power to them. My interest was in how the Creationists trolls appeared seemingly on cue, as if they were being actively organized and sent off to do battle against "the evil that is evolution".

"Do they really do that?" I thought. "Well, duh!", I answered, "And stop talking to yourself too."

Of course these people are organized, either at their churches or at various sources around the internet, and all I need to do is search around until I dig some up. So I searched, and I found a likely candidate; a forum post titled Help! need help debating an evolutionist! at a site called Chistianforums.com. Just the sort of place where I might find a seething den of Creationist scheming to troll any public forum that dares to publish about science and evolution. The original poster (OP) asked for help ...

[outdoor_engineer] I have an ongoing debate with a kid at school about evolution.
He's presenting some pretty good arguments and he's kicking my butt, can anyone help?!

... and with a little prodding OP provided details of the argument:

It is a long, drawn out logic style argument, I'll go through it step by step:
First he said that there are two different types of claims:
faith claims: those which could not be falsified by observation or experiment even in principle.
(i.e. god exists)

-and-

science claims: those which can be falsified by observation or experiment
(i.e. the earth is roughly spherical in shape)
This seemed perfectly rational, so I agreed.

he asked if I would agree that only science claims should be taught in science class. After some hemming and hawwing I agreed.

then the argument went like this:

faith based claims are those that which cannot be falsified.
faith based claims should not be taught in science class.
Creationism / ID can incorporate any evidence by saying "God made it that way"
Therefore creationism / ID cannot be falsified
Therefore creationism / ID should not be taught in science class.

He got me, Where did I go wrong? where's the flaw in his logic that I can't see?

This OP kid is up against a good argument, but this is where things started to go wrong. I was expecting the first reply to an irrational screed, but what came next was this:

[Mallon] There is no flaw in his argument. He's right.

Why do you think creationism should be taught in science class?

Huh? What?! This was supposed to be an investigative post about where trolls come from - where they live, what they plan, how they organize. I wanted to blog about that. I intended to blog about that. WHAT'S GOING ON???  How can my seething den of rabid Creationism be filled with educated, thinking, rational people. This is horrible! My first attempt is an utter failure.

But what a wonderful way to fail.

If your read the thread you will see a number of rational people writing similar comments, but a real troll does finally show up on page 2, who writes ...

[Calypsis4] I'll give you some help, young person.

1. Evolution does not exist in the first place because if it did it would be a violation of natural law. (a) the law of Biogenesis...life must generate from life. It cannot generate from non-living matter and no one has ever observed such a thing occur in nature. (2) Entropy keeps non-living matter from developing into living organisms and entropy keeps living organisms from becoming a different kind of organism. (3) the fossil record reveals that living organisms began abruptly, highly complex and no transitional forms. [...]

2. God meant what He said through Moses and the creation in Genesis and there is no historical reason not to believe the account he gave us. Even the ten commandments affirm the six day creation account (Exodus 20:11). Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ affirmed the six day creation account (Mark 10:6 & 13:19). All of His disciples taught that the creation was true and that Adam and Eve were real people.

3. Evolution is nowhere taught in the Bible. It is a fairy tale.
[emphasis added]

Pity this poor troll, for he is about to get body-slammed:

[pgp protector]
1) Evolution has nothing to do with Biogenesis, please learn what the theory states.

2) Genesis only works that way if you read it as 100% literal, and that also makes God a deceiver (God made the Earth look old, but told us it's young).

3) computers programing is nowhere taught in the Bible. Please stop using the internet.
[emphasis added]

I laughed. I howled. My wife wondered what the heck I found so funny. The troll introduces some fun and it turns into a rollicking good 8 flaming pages of Young Earth Creatroll versus Theistic Evolutionists. Darned sharp TE's too - I could learn something from them. I also learned that this forum has "darker" corners, which might be the lair of the trolls I seek. My search has just begun.

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

Last night I read the post and comments over at Pandas Thumb about the latest kerfluff over a simple search algorithm given by Richard Dawkins in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker. "Oh That's Easy!" I thought, "It's so simple I could even code that in a spreadsheet."

This morning I did just that, and you can download the spreadsheet and try it yourself.

This being a spreadsheet a manual step is required, and some instructions are needed in any case. Below is a screen-shot of the spreadsheet:



Columns B:I represent 8 letter codes that can be selected. Cells B3:I3 are the "parent" string, randomly generated letter A-Z, and below that are 500 "children" of the parent. Each letter has a 5% chance of being randomly replaced in each child string. (I'll come back to cells B2:I2).
Cells J1:Q1 (black block with yellow text) give a target string "METHINKS". Below this is a grade for the codes of the parent and each child string. Each of the 8 codes receive a 1 (one) if it matches the target, and a 0 (zero) if it does not. Theses grades are totaled to determine the "Score" for each. The maximum score is given, along with a row number of the maximum (used internally, it does not match actual row numbers).

For this first "generation" of children, the maximum number of matches to the target string is 1, and the codes corresponding to the first occurrence of this maximum, or the "best" scoring match, are displayed in cells B2:I2. The maximum Score is 1, and you can see that cell C2 contains the single correct match.

Now comes the manual step, because I don't want to get into macros for automatic updating:


1) Select cells B2:I2 and Copy.
2) Select cell B3.
3) Choose: Paste --> Paste Values. This should replace the contents of cells B3:I3 with what you copied from B2:I2.

The spreadsheet will automatically update (so fast you will probably miss it). Congratulations, you have just created generation #2. As you can see in my example above, the "best" string now has two correct matches. This manual step carries forward any improvement in matching the target string from one generation to the next.

Now repeat the manual step again for generation #3:


My example now has three correct matches. This would not have to be the case - it is possible to get a new generation where the score does not increase. It is even possible that the score among the children could actually go down; there is no latching. A score going down would be rare as I have defined this. I could increase the probability of this happening by increasing the mutation rate. Also, as I have defined this, the Score for the parent is included among the children's Scores, so the maximum Score cannot actually decrease from one generation to the next. That would be easy enough to change.

Generation #4:


Generation #5:


Generation #6:


Generation #7:


Generation #9:


That's right, #9, not #8. My #8 did not improve in Score over #7, and so it stayed the same. In this case you can skip the cut-and-paste step and press the F9 key to recalculate the next generation instead.

Generation #10:


We have arrived! The Best string is now "METHINKS" which matches the target. No embedded information, just a crude sort of random hill-climbing algorithm.

Still this isn't a very good representation of evolution. An improvement representation would be to allow all the highest scoring children to reproduce, not just the first one as in my simple demonstration. I think perhaps Dawkins' original algorithm allowed for this.

I wonder what the folks over at Uncommon Decent will have to say about this?



Here is a link to some other WEASEL algorithms, originally organized by Ian Musgrave. I haven't actually looked at these, but I'll wager they are all better than mine.

Also ran: Reality

From The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin's theory.

Not so surprising really, people are generally afraid of change, of things they do not understand, and of letting go of the familiar. I might have to count myself in that group too.
[Hat Tip Improbable Research]

Ride 'Em Cowboy!

A picture is worth a thousand words.



Lots more pictures at Camels With Hammers.



Video here, or see the tweets.



If you missed what this is all about, see this post at Phyrangula.



My favorite, a picture from Islanddave.






For the record, I am an agnostic, and I applaud the Secular Student Alliance in their efforts to shine the light of reason on creationist silliness.

Y e s or N o

[via Pharyngula]

Oh for crying out loud, it's a "Yes or No" question: Do you believe in evolution?



Chris Matthews has great fun with this.

Dance Like a Monkey

[via Pharyngula. PZ seems to get all the good stuff first.]


Some of us may also recall an older generation of Monkees ...

Troubled Waters ... and then a Funny Thing Happened

Noted Scholar gives his take on the merits of Intelligent Design.

It was a rousing good argument back on the SciAm.com blog pages - back when they had blog pages - that started off with comments on an article about Ben Stein's movie and continued on for months in an evolution versus ID free-for-all. Those were truly glory days.

Something surprising happened along the way, amidst the endless argument; I made a friend on the other side. A man of education, intelligence, interest in science, and a deep conviction in his faith. A man with whom I have a very fundamental disagreement on the very basis of science, but one whom I could respect and share an honest conversation. He reminded me that people have a basis for what they believe in, and if you are able to really communicate with them, it is possible to reach common ground. At least you can do this with people who are open and honest, and this man is among the best. We still trade notes and news on a regular basis.

Funny things happen - This post started off as another poke at ID, a boost for a fellow blogger and kindred spirit, and a remembrance of how I got started blogging. Somehow my thoughts were turned to the positive experience I got out of my early evolution/ID discussions, completely off-track from what I had intended to write. That is the nature of blogging I suppose, to share your thoughts, and I'm glad I took the time to share this.

Science, Evolution, and Creationism

National Academy of Sciences publishes this nice brochure on Science, Evolution, and Creationism (PDF). A wise person recommends this for those who need a little help understanding.

Mock Trial of Evolution versus Creationism

From Pharyngula: An account of the Northern Kentucky University mock trial of evolution/creationism.

Greg Lloyd attended the Northern Kentucky University mock trial of evolution/creation, and sent back a report. The scenario was that a teacher tried to advocate creationist theories in a public high school classroom, was fired for it, and is trying to sue for reinstatement. Here's Greg's account of the event.

Click through for the full account and comments.