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The experience of arguing on the internets leads me to believe that this hypothesis counts for much of my frustration with others. :)
And no, I do not think I fall into the lower quartiles, for the record.
One of the top hits for my blog is people looking for information about Evolution. Evolution when examined in depth is an amazing process with many levels of complexity and nuance. I’m thinking though that people are not looking for all the details, perhaps just an overview of what it is all about. In that vein, I found a short little post from Brain Dunning, and the next excerpt is from his site.
Myth #1: Men evolved from modern apes.
This is the oldest and wrongest misconception about evolution. Nobody has ever suggested that one living species changes into a different living species. Some criticisms of evolution show illustrations that fraudulently purport to show what evolutionists claim: that a salmon changed into a turtle, which changed into an alligator, which changed into a hippo, which changed into a lion, and then into a monkey, and then into a human being. Of course such a theory would seem ludicrous. But it’s pure fantasy and has nothing in common with real evolution.
The diversification of species is like a forest of trees, sprouting from the proverbial primordial soup. Many trees die out. Some don’t grow very tall. Some have grown a lot over the eons and are still growing today. Trees branch out, and branches branch out themselves, but branches never come back together or combine from two different trees. The path of a species’ evolution is shaped like the branch of a tree, not a donut, not a figure 8, not a ladder. To embrace evolution, you need not — must not — think that a salmon turns into a zebra, or that an ape turns into a man. It’s simply not genetically possible.
We’ve all seen the other famous illustration, where a monkey morphs into an ape, that morphs into a caveman, that morphs into homo sapiens. If you climb back down the tree branch, you will indeed find earlier versions of man where he was smaller, hairier, and dumber, but it won’t be a modern ape. To find a modern ape, you’d need to go even further down the tree, millions and millions of years, find an entirely different branch, and then follow that branch through different genetic variants, past numerous other dead-end branches, past other branches leading to other modern species, and then you’ll find the modern ape. Never the twain shall meet.
Myth #2: Evolution is like a tornado in a junkyard forming a perfect 747.
Large Hadron Collider to restart in fall after 1-year hiatus
The magnet core of the world’s largest superconducting solenoid magnet, seen in 2007, is part of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. Abnormally high resistances were found in the accelerator’s high-current superconducting electrical connections and have since been repaired. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone/Associated Press)The world’s largest particle accelerator is scheduled to gradually start up again in November after being shut down for more than a year.
The $9-billion project was shut down on Sept. 19, 2008, after just nine days of operation. The meltdown of a small electrical connection had caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-kilometre long tunnel, near the Franco-Swiss border. Its restart date has been delayed several times since then.
Heuer said the machine is now “a much better understood machine than it was a year ago.” CERN expects to run the collider at 3.5 TeV for several weeks until a “significant data sample” has been collected, then gradually increase the energy to 5 TeV per beam. It expects to run a test with lead ions at the end of 2010 before shutting the machine down again in an effort to get it ready to move towards its maximum power.”
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I have always had an interest in physics. It is a shame that numbers and equations cause my brain to 404 faster than you can say ‘system error’. I hope that that once they fire up the LHC they can start earnestly looking for the elusive higgs-boson that so far has eluded them. It would be one of those fantastic cornerstone discoveries that has the potential to change the face of physics. Grab the original article from the CBC here.
With many thanks from Mr.Bowditch for posting this to his website.
With Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday just past and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species coming up, this is a big year for Darwin fans. The magazine Nature is celebrating as hard as anyone, and one of their contributions is a pamphlet titled 15 Evolutionary Gems. They are encouraging everybody to distribute it and I am only too happy to comply, so you can see a copy here. Feel free to distribute it as widely as possible. The list of its contents appears below.
- Gems from the fossil record
- Land-living ancestors of whales
- From water to land
- The origin of feathers
- The evolutionary history of teeth
- The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
- Gems from habitats
- Natural selection in speciation
- Natural selection in lizards
- A case of co-evolution
- Differential dispersal in wild birds
- Selective survival in wild guppies
- Evolutionary history matters
- Gems from molecular processes
- Darwin’s Galapagos finches
- Microevolution meets macroevolution
- Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
- Variation versus stability
Check out Richard Dawkins book on basic evolution here.
If there is a standard I aspire to, it would be to the level of Pharyngula. A quote from one of his posts on Ken Ham and Creationists…
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/a_little_sympathy_for_the_snoo.php
“I sympathize with all their secular neighbors most of all. What will happen? They will live in a country where their schools are third-rate, because the creationists will suppress education not just for their own kids, but for everyone else’s, too. They will see their school boards populated with the products of such fare as the Creation “Museum”, and they will get to vote in elections where their options are Insane-Fundie-Wackjob vs. Slightly-Less-Crazy-God-Botherer. And the lesser-of-two-evils won’t always win, because their neighbors all think the fundier, the better.
I sympathize because they are all missing the awesomeness of reality for the awfulness of some narrow Bronze Age theocratic bullshit.
But there are also some for whom I have no sympathy at all.
I have zero sympathy for intelligent people who stand before a grandiose monument to lies, an institution that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and ultimately anti-human, in a place where children are being actively miseducated, an edifice dedicated to an abiding intellectual evil, and choose to complain about how those ghastly atheists are ruining everything.
Those people can just fuck off.”
Thank you PZ. :)
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