I think that you should just laugh at the world instead of trying to change it. You can come up with preety lulzy stuff.

Why would you think I have this opinion? Anyway our voters are just as stupid as their american counterparts, democracy is just a big joke where people think their votes matter, the worse part is that democracy beats everything else.

People's votes do matter... or at least, they would if they believed they did. Since people really don't believe their votes matter, they don't put much thought in to how they vote, which lets politicians campaign with sound bites and idiocy instead of well thought-out policies, and they aren't punished for not keeping their word. Because "my vote doesn't matter" and "all politicians are the same". When, of course, believing the first has led to the second.

I think theyre is some kinda prisoner dillema going on with voting, people are better off by not giving a **** and just voting for whoever looks cooler. If we all cared we would be better off if nobody cared but if only I care then Im better off by not caring.

to be honest, i think the proportion of the the population of the educated world that actually understand evolution, rather than have some garbled version that doesn't even touch the sides, is probably <5%

I dont understand evolution, I just think its true because lots of smart scientists say so.

The fact that you do or do not understand evolution is meaningless. It's hard to understand.

What matters is that you value rationality, evidence, fact and critical thinking over emotion.

i also think that it's probably true (although i admit i don't really know enough about it) to say that the theory of evolution is bad science, from the pov that it's not really possible to design experiments to (dis)prove it.

I mean, 90% (or more) of people dont' really understand gravity, beyond "it keeps me on the ground", which is about the same level of understanding they have of evolution. Fortunately, there isn't a widespread movement to disprove gravity in favour of the theory of fairies holding on to our feet so we don't float away.

...and you believe whatever the men in white coats with funny beards tell you?

A scientist (whose name I can't remember, but I could be motivated to find it) spent 40 years studying a very common bacteria whose name escapes me.

One of the defining characteristics of this bacteria is that it does not feed on citrates. So he grew them in low nutrient high citrate environments. With lots of sciency stuff in the middle, after 40 years and thousands (millions?) of generations of bacteria, he's bred a strain that now prefers citrate as a food source.

Seems pretty solid. Added to that is all the work Darwin did, fossils, etc.

When all the men in white coats and funny beards agree, and can explain why (even if I don't understand the nitty gritty details), then one must at least consider that they're right.

Contrast that with the creationists whose argument is "evolution is too hard to understand. therefore, it's not true".

Obviously it fits most/all the evidence, that's fine and dandy. But so did the theory that the sun was driven around by some guy in a chariot until people got telescopes good enough to take a closer look.

A really good scientific theory is disprovable, in the sense that you can design an experiment and test the predictions of the theory. AFAICS, the best you can do with evolution is sit around for 10 million years and see if we grow wings. The bacteria malarky is obviously much better, from this pov.

Evolution is disprovable.

Find a species with no evidence of having evolved from another species.

Then at that time believing that theory was the rational believe, I believe Zurvan isnt discussing evolution by itself but rather the rationality of believing in evolution( correct me If Im wrong Zurvan).

Ya, I'm kinda discussing both points simultaneously

also, in a sense, there's no doubt that evolution occurs. Once you have DNA, and reproduction via sex, etc. etc. you KNOW evolution must be going on to some extent - it's a process that happens in systems like the one you're working in. What you don't know, is whether evolution is capable of generating enough changes to explain biodiversity. Evolution could be happening, and leading to some inconsequential changes, whilst some more powerful effect does most of the work (i dunno, some white-bearded guy meddling around)

Once you accept that evolution is changing a species, you have to, logically, accept that it's changing everything about a species. Small incremental changes, over time (hello, 6 billion years) can add up to a lot. You also need to consider that the random changes, by definition, cannot be localised to small factors. Being random, they can change anything. To say that ONLY small changes are evolution, and large changes are "something else" you're basically saying you don't believe in evolution, because there's something with an overarching control over WHAT evolution can affect.

Biodiversity is a logical extension of that... random changes will eventually (remember, 6 billion years) create an organism that thrives on everything. If there's too much competition for resources in the ocean, eventually something will end up on a beach once in a while. The things that end up on a beach will have an advantage if they can stay there for a long time. That leads to a strengthening of the ability to breathe air (because animals that can live longer, therefore breed more), and can take advantage of the new land-based resources.

Just because something isn't disproveable, doesn't mean it's not the logical thing to believe.

If two possible scenarios are both disprovable, but all the evidence would suggest that one theory over the other is most likely correct, it would be illogical not to believe the theory backed by evidence.

The theory of evolution isn't complicated at all really. The people that complicate it are the creationists that come up with reasons to accept microevolution and dispell macroevolution, two terms invented, it would appear, solely to muddy the waters of what is proveable because it is impossible for any group of people to even come to an acceptance on where microevolution ends and marcoevolutuion begins.

The theory of evolution is so fundamentally logical and supported by evidence, that is leaves me dumbfounded when intelligent people reject it. We have seen in fruit flies, and bacteria as Zurvan says, evidence of small changes in dna over generations that derive from genes being selected for over others. the logical implications are so glaringly obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of biology and logic that to fully understand them AND argue against them takes a special type of selective thinking that makes me wonder how we ever achieve anything.

Also, more fossil evidence of the proto-ape to human transition would be helpful. It's kind of a dark point in the record.

Helpful yes, but using that as a dealbreaker when the overwhelming cumulative evidence would suggest that evolution happened is crazy talk.

Just looking at it from the perspective of Joe Six-Pack. I think while a lot of people are willing to accept that animals evolve, and that natural selection takes place, they are not willing to accept that human beings evolved.

edit:

And actually, hitch, it is rather complicated. I have a book by Steven Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, that is over 1400 pages including the bibliography and index, and this book is quite controversial in some of the conclusions that it draws. Not arguments as to whether or not it happened of course, but as to the exact mechanisms and so forth.

Well, the thing is, you can only falsify theories in the sense that they are forward-looking. You can falsify the theory that light is composed of photons, insofar as it predicts things about the behavior of light in the future. It is impossible to falsify the theory that when I turned on my bedroom light this morning, the light it emitted was composed of photons. How could I do it? That particular light existed only in the past. But no one complains about the "theory of photons" being bad science.

Likewise, the notion that organisms evolve through natural selection and that new species can be created through that mechanism is well-supported, as a general principle. The specific instance of evolution that generated the human species is naturally unfalsifiable, because it's in the past. But if you accept the notion that human evolution is not scientifically proven, you basically have to abandon any kind of scientific understanding of any process that you are not actually experimenting on at that point.

(That's disregarding predictions about the fossil record, which could be quasi-forward-looking, but there are some limitations there.)

Which is a clear example of the illogical selective thinking I am talking about.

Congratulations to myself, I just finished my first couch->5k workout.
The week 1 stuff doesn't seem too challanging eventhough I'm more exhausted than expected. Did any of you change it up from the run,rest,run,rest,run plan? I got basketball practice on Wednsdays and Thursdays + the games (usually on Saturdays) on the weekend since the season is about to start. I think I'll do
- rest Monday
- Run Tuesday
- BB
- BB
Run Friday
BB
- Run Sunday

Clearly I'll comment on the evolution thingy after dinner