That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘creationism’

I have been wanting for a while to write an article that suitably articulates my theory on a link between evolution, selective breeding and the bible thumpers of America. This is just a thought piece at the moment and has no substantiation whatsoever.

A lot of the early settlers that moved to the US and occupy the mid west were the oppressed puritanical whackos, they left europe and became the dominant group in an otherwise uninhabited (from the european perspective) area. As the dominant group, not only did they ensure that their offspring were of a similar mindset but they can also ensure that outsiders or those that do not think the way they do are not as successful as those who conform. As the area was rich in resources the population has been able to explode almost unhindered in this new territory in the same way as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia.

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org

A while back I was on my local highstreet milling about. I was approached by a couple of young black kids who were preaching the word of their handlers the Lord to anyone who would listen. The conversation, quite predictably, came around to talk of evolution and creationism intelligent design and how apparently the scientific community has been lying to everyone for a great many years and have been hiding the flaws in the theory of evolution from the lay people. I was a little bored waiting for my partner to finish shopping so I engaged with these young lads and we had a very enlightening discussion where I tried to reason with them and they recited the script that they had memorised.

During the conversation they got quite excited on a number of occasions when I pointed out flaws in the traditional evolutionary theory. There is currently a lot of research which casts doubt on the selfish gene theory or at the very least modifies it to include the passing of learned traits through the generations. All of these doubts have been set upon by the fundies to ‘prove’ that the theory is absolute rubbish and a big bloke in the sky with a beard and a passion for child abuse is a more plausable explanation for the way things are today.

The point I was trying to make to deaf ears was that all along the road to scientific enlightenment is littered with debunked theories. They are theories because they have some evidence to support them but that does not make them fact. Science is a revisionary process, it starts with a hypothesis, an idea, and then evidence is gathered that supports it. Some times the evidence is there already and the hypothesis is created that then fits the evidence. Once this has been done and the hypothesis has been formed into a theory it is published to the wider scientific community who attempt to test it using their own reasoning.

My school had some very old text books and in some of them there were some rather strange theories about all manner of things. It used to be accepted that ‘negros’ and ‘orientals’ were separate sub species of human; that the smallest particles were protons electrons and neutrons. It was also accepted a little longer ago that the basic elements of the earth were fire, water, earth and air but these theories have been superceded by better explanations based on new evidence. There is no disrespect due to the authors of these old text books because based on the evidence available at the time many of their reasonings are sound. Science though, requires that all theories are constantly tested and results are compared to help us find better theories to explain the things around us.

I like that you have taken the time to read this blog, doing so suggests a thirst for answers, but I would hate to think that it was accepted blindly as truth. Many of the arguements and conflicts around the world are due to people taking things blindly on faith rather than questioning the information, gathering evidence for themselves and applying reason to make their own decisions.

I don’t know how we came to be here, by chance or by design. I suspect that nobody will every know the answer but having looked at the available evidence I have made up my own mind. My application of reason is this: evidence exists to support evolution and the scientific community is constantly working to improve the theory and gather evidence that either supports or debunks it. Intelligent design is a belief from one of those very old text books which was supported by the evidence available a few thousand years ago. The group who champion this belief are not prepared to challenge it themselves or revise it in the face of new evidence. The belief is entirely faith based and entirely incongruent with modern evidence, every rational and reasonable arguement that a rational and reasonable person may want to have with a believer is countered only with insistence that it is a matter of faith rather than one of evidence.

No you are not. You are randomly generated freaks of nature that just happened to carry a bunch of genes that were fairly well suited to the environment in which your ancestors lived.

A little while ago I got cornered by a two creationists who wanted to try to persuade me, an intelligent and rational person, that the theory of evolution was in fact a sham and that creationism or intelligent design was the faith based explanation that I should take more seriously. Unfortunately I have read the Bible and they had not read anything on the subject of evolution other than the materials they had been fed by their handlers. I tried rational reason but they had been well programmed to just talk over me and so I left them with the following question before I left: “have you seen any evidence of creationism?” no? well I have seen enough evidence of evolution to satisfy me for the time being, but fortunately you don’t have to take my word for it or act on faith because the evidence is there for you to see yourself.

What I don’t get is the constant quest by the fundamentalist christians to try to persuade people that something written as a parable or metaphor two thousand years ago should be taken as litteral. In the same way that kosher jews are just idiots following a several thousand year old health and safety manual, those who take religion to be litteral rather than a basic framework for morality are just dumb. Religion has always been a great way to pacify the masses; be good now and you get eternity of happiness. Religion is also a way to promote the idea of marriage and avoid men unknowingly investing their time and resources providing for an illigitimate child, the fear behind the culture of monogamy in the Abrahamic and other religions. We have now moved on and so litteral interpretations of whatever brand of creator fantasy are just no longer relevant in a world where communcations, science and law replace the requirement for religion.