51. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129808 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Programme about child preachers ....is actually pretty sad.

No, I think it's worse than sad. I wonder if it's the same one whose mother told the cameraman to stop recording while she spanked her son for not doing as he was told.

52. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129803 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Flu is us, not the virus

Well, there you go. I am learning things I didn't know all the time. I can see that the new Prof for the Public Understanding of Science has still a huge task on his/her hands.

53. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129793 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:23 pm

Monty Hall problem

hmmmmm...now i am completely lost... even though I have just read an article on what it's all about.

54. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129787 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:17 pm

so its good that you provide cogent argrument even

I guess I am mistrustful of cogent argument alone. After all it was scientists who helped put that poor bloke away on Dawkins' film. Rather shocking that they had been arrogant enough to assume they could be sure of the truth of what had happened with that guys daughter....and it took the uneducated man years in jail and his own research to find the right specialist to give a true account.

I suppose there is a bit of the "Doubting Thomas" in me. "Unless I place my finger ...etc..."

55. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129779 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:08 pm

when they are counter-intuitive (which most of them are

Interesting.

56. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129773 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 3:04 pm

What I tire of is "armchair scientists" trying to hand-wave away scientific issues simply because they may have some mild religions conflicts.

I don't think I am. I could never claim to be any kind of scientist; merely an observer of scientist. Regrettably the only ones I know are school teachers, who seem to shy away from discussion (and no I am not any way agressive - quite the reverse really). I have to rely on what I read. I am frequently asked to provide evidence. I am told to look around me for evidence. What I see around me is diversity, not evolution happening. We discuss various animals and how they have been bred to produce different characteristics. I am then asked to extrapolate these relatively small changes into much greater differences between species that cannot inter-breed. Okay, in theory I can see that given enough time etc it may well ybe possible that two very different animals today could have had the same ancestor. All I've said is that I don't think I have been shown that happening nowadays. What I am told, it seems that most creatures on the earth share lots of DNA and that we are even distant cousins of plants. The whole universe could then be seen as one big family.

I am told that bacteria can be seen to evolve in front of our eyes, and that flu changes all the time - it's still flu....

Curious that we must be distantly related to 'flu and yet it attacks us. I guess that is merely the nature of the natural world we are part of.

I am also interested that no-one here appears to be looking forward and predicting any kind of future.

57. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129719 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:54 pm

May i ask what science book you are reading?

I'm reading "Almost everyone's guide to Science" by John Gribbin...as recommended by a contributor to one of these forums. Will that do to start? I hope so.

I don't think I have much of a problem with the ideas of evolution. I've watched Dawkins' Growing up in the Universe. I think I understand the theory. I am not yet convinced of the reality. Seems to me that the theory has relied on detective work. From time to time I am asked to look at examples of evolution happening right now.

If it you are interested, you will be pleased to hear that I have finally cracked and I have today ordered a copy of "The God Delusion" . I hope it's as exciting as commentators here suggest.

58. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129411 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 4:35 am

Well, I guess while we are arguing about the past, and whether religion is good or bad for us....

the environmentalists are having another battle to persuade the world that we need to do something now to stop us all disappearing into oblivion, before it is too late.

59. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129328 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:34 am

Well, I'm off to munch on my porridge oats....

60. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129318 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:28 am

What's important for survival is behaviour of a certain kind, not metaphysical convictions.

but,surely, that is part of what religions have sought to do.....ensure particular kinds of behaviour in order to promote survival.

61. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129310 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:26 am

I wonder if some strange attempt to justify belief

What cannot be doubted is that belief existed and continues to exist. Are you saying that what people think is not linked to their physical bodies?

62. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129307 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:23 am

Greek mythology you can see gods disappearing or being assimilated as conquests occurred.

.and that would have been true if there has been a particularly delicious animal that T. Rex enjoyed eating and was easy to find and catch.....

63. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129304 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:20 am

What a strange statement. Why?

Why do you think that is a strange statement?

64. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129302 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:16 am

ust because people believe in particular things doesn't make them true.

No, of course not, which is why I am happy to remain open-minded, and not extrapolate absolute certainty from high probability.

65. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129300 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 1:13 am

Sorry, but this is easily shown to be nonsense

I am not convinced that you are right. But in any case, if you believe in evolution, belief in a deity has to have been part of the process.

66. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129291 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 12:53 am

the theory of Evolution, and these questions are answered in any decent popular science book on the subject.

..Which I am slowly doing....reading a science book. If some of my comments appear frivolous....they probably are. Sorry for the confusion.

As Dawkins has said, it's the truth that is important.

Given that we accept evolution, then I suspect it is pretty certain that we have to accept that belief in God/gods has to be part of the evolutionary process, and was (is) important for the survival of particular groups of peoples.

Without their mono-theistic beliefs and well-developed religious systems, they would surely never have survived as an identifiable entity given the hammering they have taken over the centuries.

67. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129285 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 12:35 am

the far more knowledgeable and sophisticated understanding of the species concept
Perhaps, I am mis-understanding the word "species".

68. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129283 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 12:31 am

I'd like for you to speculate on an investigable mechanism that allows changes from wolves to poodles and chihuahuas, but prevents any longer term continuation of the same processes. Do you have any hypothesis that adds "within kind" limitations to the apparently already agreed upon "limited" evolutionary theory?

thank you for your lengthy and lucid explanation. Very helpful

69. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129275 by krisking on February 19, 2008 at 12:24 am

That was a goal-post shift worthy of wooter! Evolution is disproved because we haven't bred talking cows?

..another quantum leap in thinking!! Why do you say I am trying to disprove evolution? You are wrong. I am trying to understand it.

70. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129115 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 4:19 pm

And we're still a kind of ape...

..but where are the talking cattle?

71. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129109 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 4:15 pm

http://users.aristotle.net/~swarmack/aurochs.html

So the aurochs survived quite late in history..... 1627

Still a kind of cattle though.

72. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129104 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 4:08 pm

Chinese Darwins...let's see what google can provide...
http://www.jstor.org/view/00211753/ap010229/01a00050/0

Sorry, won't let me in.

73. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129099 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 4:04 pm

You can't look at life and the world and, with any use of rationality or science say "that really needed a God".

So it seems.

74. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129097 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 4:02 pm

In the wild, animals have sex and make babies. In captivity, animals have sex and make babies.

Yes, I've understood thus far.

Much of the breeding that has been done over the millenia was without any serious thought or planning

Race-horses?

..but we are talking about making improvements or changes to specific animals.......how long does it take to make a completely different self-replicating animal?

75. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129092 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:55 pm

Who is to say there wasn't a Chinese or Indian Darwin out there, centuries before the Beagle?

Might they not have written about it? Could be hidden in a chinese archive somewhere..

76. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129088 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:53 pm

However, this makes the already phenomenal complexity gap between God and living things much, much wider.

Interesting idea. .....and makes God that much more inaccessible, I guess.

77. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129086 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:52 pm

after all, people have been breeding animals for millenia.

Is that really the same thing?

78. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129084 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:51 pm

391. Comment #129065 by robert s on February 18, 2008 at 3:27 pm
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2215,Sprinting-down-the-evolutionary-highway,The-Star

Thanks for that. Interesting article....the bit about the shrinking brain size was striking!

79. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129067 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:28 pm

If you have some mechanism for producing the almost unimaginable complexity of God, I would be interested to hear it

Well, it wasn't so long ago that nobody knew or understood about evolution!...

Nor was it that long ago that scientists thought that the world was simply eternal and didn't have a beginning.

80. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129064 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:27 pm

therefore will breed more successfully will survive

This is the bit that I meant no longer applies to humans, since we control who we breed with, whether we breed at all, and how many offspring we produce.

81. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129063 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:24 pm

You'd be wrong. In fact, recent articles suggest we are evolving faster

Really? Please point me to some key ones.

82. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129054 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:10 pm

I really don't understand it. On the one hand Dawkins talks about the immense improbability of evolution happening and attempts to show us a way out of it, but on the other hand he tells that the probability of the existence of God is extremely small, so therefore God does not exist!!

83. Why Darwin matters

Comment #129052 by krisking on February 18, 2008 at 3:06 pm

ungodlyatheist (interesting tautology)

Thank you for your thoughtful answer.

It is an attempt to reply to the silly argument that evolution is wrong because the chance of life and the arising of speices happening by random processes is extremely unlikely.

Are you saying here that the chance of life etc is extremely unlikely?

Dawkins would agree with you, but the problem is not with Dawkins

I disagree. It is very much his problem. He is the one trying to explain to the doubters. He is the teacher.

very 'key strike' (mutation) that aids the survival of the gene by its adaptation of the Phenotype is not lost.

How do you know? Presumably our ancestors were once amphibian, but we no longer are.....but that quality would have been very useful.....and may soon be so to our survival if sea levels rise sufficiently!!

Those genes that create phenotypes that are better adapted to their eviroment, and therefore will breed more successfully will survive and so the new 'useful' information in the gene is passed on.

I reckon this is no longer true for humans.

The process is not random

I clearly do not understand the scientific meaning of the word "random" or rather the phrase "not random"

84. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #128686 by krisking on February 17, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Comment #126982 by Jiten on February 14, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Absolutely.I just prefer the ideas of today's thinkers,who are generally scientists.See edge.org.

Interesting site.....read this on charitable giving......

http://www.edge.org/discourse/moral_religion.html#haidt

85. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #128527 by krisking on February 17, 2008 at 9:49 am

eXcommunicate

If Hamas or the local Church of Christ is the one providing for your family's social, emotional, and/or financial security, then who are Atheists and/or the big bad secular West? The ones that will take that security away. It's a simple, but deep psychological equation that occurs in every one of us, not just "fundamentalists". It's the root of tribalism.

So what do we do to replace that security net and loosen the grip of fundamentalism and ultimately religion altogether? All I hear from fellow Atheists is that they want to rip the blanket off people and expose them to cold hard truth and reality. No solutions at all, but to throw cold water onto a freezing man. Sure, rip that blanket of false security and false truth off of a person, but a person still needs warmth. What we need instead is a different kind of blanket, not just cold water, or else religious fundamentalism will never wane.

Did anyone come back to you on this comment?

86. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting

Comment #128525 by krisking on February 17, 2008 at 9:42 am

MelM

Of course, disrespect is not going to make him any friends among the religious; that's not the point.

What is then? That you think you are right and that they are wrong?

That'll lead to world peace!

87. BREAK THE SCIENCE BARRIER - Available Now on DVD

Comment #128506 by krisking on February 17, 2008 at 9:03 am

Interesting videos. Given the number of repeats we have to avoid on our televisions nowadays, how come I have not seen this advertised in the broadcasting schedules?


I'm not convinced he has answered the "why?" question, though....Certainly the "how?"

88. Why Darwin matters

Comment #128079 by krisking on February 16, 2008 at 3:42 am

Sorry to be pedantic, but isn't this self-contradictory?


In what way?

No, I've just realised, I may be confusing "reasons" with "purpose"...sorry

89. Why Darwin matters

Comment #128077 by krisking on February 16, 2008 at 3:40 am

There are evolutionary reasons for this

Sorry to be pedantic, but isn't this self-contradictory?

Thanks for the links too.

90. Why Darwin matters

Comment #128058 by krisking on February 16, 2008 at 2:08 am

Any supposed model I have ever seen of evolution seems to me to have this â€ËÅ"weakness’ (ie purpose written in somewhere).

I think it is difficult to get away for "purpose". I was googling the topic of evolution models and came across this discussion of biological time clocks. A few paragraphs in is the following:

"Because of the importance of biological clocks to survival and health, evolution has built them into an astoundingly diverse array of organisms, including bacteria and humans. These clocks make it possible for organisms to "tell time," even in the absence of such stimuli as temperature changes or daylight"

For me here the phrase "evolution has built them into an ....." suggests purpose.

It seems somewhere in the human mind is the need for purpose.

91. Why Darwin matters

Comment #127754 by krisking on February 15, 2008 at 3:03 pm

It is interesting you raised this. I actually agree with you.

I saw this a few weeks ago, and it's been at the back of my mind since. It is puzzling. I wonder if Dawkins has improved on his explanation elsewhere.

92. Why Darwin matters

Comment #127742 by krisking on February 15, 2008 at 2:51 pm

I wish you would not use the word "created"

I was quoting Dawkins!

93. Why Darwin matters

Comment #127740 by krisking on February 15, 2008 at 2:49 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ghuVDSHY48&feature=related

Here is part of a series lectures given by Dawkins to children. He attempts to explain evolution by means of a comuter simulation where he compares "Doyle's monkey" with "Darwin's".

See the computer simulation....but the problem for me is that the Darwin monkey is being compared to the target phrases until it hits a right letter. This means there is purpose, as Dawkins says "it has a distant target in mind which natural selection does not have". And yet he goes on to say that it does show us the key to the way out of mammoth improbability. I can't see how it does. He gives this (as he admits) faulty illustration, but then goes on to talk about smearing out the luck etc.

I think he has made a huge leap here.

94. Why Darwin matters

Comment #127723 by krisking on February 15, 2008 at 2:36 pm

Well, Dawkins says that the fish settle on the bottom and found that it had one eye facing down. So gradually over time the eye migrated, but he doesn't explain how it happened. What he does say is that this is an imperfection in design which is just the kind of thing you would expect to see if these things had evolved and not the kind of thing you would expect to see if they had been created.

My question to the last bit is, "why not?" He seems to be suggesting that it can't have been created because of its distorted shape and is not the sort of thing that one would design..... Doesn't seem like very positive argument to me.


Might one not have expected there to be some of there creatures that still have eyes looking down?...

95. Why Darwin matters

Comment #127692 by krisking on February 15, 2008 at 2:12 pm

Well, I've just come across this piece of video of Richard Dawkins explaining how a flat-fish lay down on the bottom of the ocean and then one of its eye had to move round to the front so that it could see. This explanation makes no sense to me in the context of darwinian evolution. Can anyone improve on the explanation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bldN-lbyqsE

cheers

96. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126468 by krisking on February 13, 2008 at 9:58 am

They made one already.


Robin Williams.

Ho ho ho.....or should that be ooh ooh ooh!!

97. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126459 by krisking on February 13, 2008 at 9:34 am

I read today an article about inserting human genes into monkeys. Is a half-man/half monkey possible or desirable?

Found this interesting article too

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2003/03/57892

98. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126182 by krisking on February 12, 2008 at 2:49 pm

He was never "mocking" and respected many of his religious friends, but he never accepted it either.

Well, I reckon at the end of the day, respect for each other is what will keep us from warring with each other. I do wonder why you all are so persistent in asking me about my belief in God.

On that note, I must depart. Maybe I'll come back when I've read the book. In the meantime perhaps the psychologists will be able to explain my unwillingness to relinquish the idea of God.

Nice chatting to you. Thank you all for being courteous.

Good-night

99. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126175 by krisking on February 12, 2008 at 2:36 pm

The bottom line for me, however, is whether or not some people feel the need for a god does not in any way make god true.

I'm not sure I feel the need for a god. The bottom line really is, What is the truth?

What one believes makes no difference to the truth, although it may make a difference to one's behaviour.

100. Why Darwin matters

Comment #126173 by krisking on February 12, 2008 at 2:29 pm

Why?

At the moment, because I have done for a long time, although my views have changed a lot since I was brought up in a little known church organisation that believed that we were the only ones who had the truth.

Perhaps I am like the battery chickens we rescued, who had to be coaxed out of their box to go out and experience their new freedom.

I suspect a lot of us make decisions on the emotional level as well as the rational level.