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<blockquote data-quote="grahamsnumber" data-source="post: 71700239" data-attributes="member: 293692"><p>I watched the video, and have a few comments.</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It is said, a few minutes into the video, that belief in evolution is based entirely on faith, and that no "true facts" have ever been found in support of it. Here I must strenuously disagree. A very common misunderstanding of the scientific community is that scientists are deathly afraid of accepted theories being disproved. In fact, the very opposite is true. In academia, the way you get ahead is exactly by changing or significantly extending current theories. You get a Nobel Prize by showing that something long accepted is wrong. Every physicist out there would be delighted to be the one who showed that Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, was wrong. He'd be famous for centuries. The same holds true for evolution. No one has "faith" that evolution is true, and everyone would love to be the one to overturn it if it were false. However, the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. For example, it has been pointed out by biologists that we actually have more evidence for evolution just in genetic and chemical studies than we do that the Roman empire existed! And notice - this is not including the fossil record. Think about that. How do you know that the Roman Empire ever actually existed? It all comes down to evidence. Now, we have tons and tons of evidence that it did exist: we have many physical structures all over the western world, and we have lots and lots of written evidence from the time. But there is still some probability, some tiny, tiny probability, that it's all false - forged or misunderstood. Nothing has a probability of true zero. So maybe there's a 1 in a trillion trillion trillion chance that the Roman Empire didn't exist. Well, the chance the evolution isn't true, <em>based only on genetic and other biological evidence</em>, is less than that number. Throw in the fossil record, and the number drops way, way lower. Another misunderstanding I see a lot is that evolution is now at the same state that it was in the 19th century when Darwin first proposed it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists, over decades and decades, have tried to disprove it (that's what scientists do, all the time: try to disprove things) and have failed. What has happened is just the opposite: evidence has done nothing but accumulate at an ever-increasing rate. Remember, we now no longer even need the fossil record to prove evolution - that's just how the theory got started, and the vast majority of critics, such as are shown in the video, seem to be stuck arguing the evidence that was presented in 1859. Not only is it not true that "no true facts have ever been found that support it", in fact, no true fact has ever been found that doesn't support it.<br /> <br /> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The Wall Street Journal article he quotes, from 2014, uses the long-disproven "fine-tuning" argument, which basically sees the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life as evidence of a supernatural intelligence. The article was not written by a scientist, but by a religious writer. Now, obviously, that's not a problem in itself. But it does frequently mean that the understanding of complex scientific ideas may not be completely accurate, and we do indeed see that here. For example, we really don't know all the factors that would be required for life to exist. Rather, we have some idea of the factors that would allow life as we know it here on Earth to exist. And even that understanding is limited because the process is so complex. It has been pointed out that this really is an example of life being fine-tuned for the environment in which it evolved, rather than the other way around. Another claim the article makes is that since we haven't discovered any life anywhere else, the theory of evolution is shot. One problem here is that although we haven't found life yet, we continue to find planets around other stars that seem like they'd be capable of supporting life of some kind, and we're finding them at an increasing rate. The search continues, but even if no life is found, it is not a disproof of evolution, but rather a statement of something we already know - that the process itself is complex and takes a long time - maybe complex and slow enough that it just hasn't happened anywhere else in <em>our</em> part of <em>our own</em> galaxy (remember, there are over a hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars). And quoting Fred Hoyle, a physicist, not a biologist, on evolution is a weak version of the argument from authority, in which an expert is found and cherry-picked, rather than looking at the overwhelming number of actual biologists on the other side. Being an outsider is fine, and the arguments are interesting and valid to have, but you can't use the one person you can find who agrees with you and plop him down on the table as if it vastly bolsters your case. Because I'll find thousands of academics, every bit as qualified as Hoyle (much more qualified, actually, since they are experts in the biology itself) to say the opposite.<br /> <br /> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Farther in, the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics are brought up in a way that has long been shown to be based on a faulty understanding of those laws. One argument he makes is that the radioactive elements such as uranium must all have come into existence in the beginning, since they've been decaying ever since. However, this is false. The big-bang model states that originally, only energy came into existence (but even this is hard to understand, because a common version of the theory has time itself starting at the same event), and eventually you got only one type of atom: hydrogen. All the other atomic varieties come into existence through fusion taking place in the center of stars, and the heavier elements like uranium are created when a star explodes in a supernova, and the vast forces involved end up making the heavy elements by fusing together lighter ones. This happens continually. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss have talked a lot about the "nothing from nothing" idea that is so counter-intuitive to humans. His book A Universe From Nothing is a very good popular-level discussion of the issue. A subtle and oft missed point, I think, is that the word "theory" in science and math doesn't mean the same thing that it does in everyday English. When we use the word in our daily life, we mean something more like a hunch or an idea. Scientifically, the word refers to a solid body of work that has a consistent model and has been vetted by different experts for a very long time. The "theory of evolution" isn't just some armchair-based speculation that happened over a beer by a couple of dudes having a good time. Rather, it is a consistent model of an enormous body of data that has been examined from every possible direction and tested over and over again in every possible way for over a century by hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Another point is that it is tempting but disastrous to use your everyday visualizations when trying to understand physics that is outside our everyday experience. Those visualizations are very useful for living on Earth as a biological being of our size. But they can lead you far astray if you rely on them when thinking about the huge scale, like cosmology, or the tiny scale, like quantum mechanics. In both of those areas, you have to cast aside your preconceived visualizations of how things work, and rely solely on the mathematics. This is because visualizing things like a 4-dimensional curved spacetime are impossible to directly do. But understanding them is not impossible if you use mathematics. You might not be able to "see" a curved spacetime, but you can work with it and apply it successfully by using the math, and that leads to a certain kind of understanding. This is all the more true when trying to talk about the origin of the universe, where time itself becomes highly nonlinear - something that is utterly foreign to us.</li> </ul><p>Haha, well, this post got a bit longer than I thought it would. So I'll shut up now. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite77" alt=":wink:" title="Wink :wink:" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":wink:" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="grahamsnumber, post: 71700239, member: 293692"] I watched the video, and have a few comments. [LIST] [*]It is said, a few minutes into the video, that belief in evolution is based entirely on faith, and that no "true facts" have ever been found in support of it. Here I must strenuously disagree. A very common misunderstanding of the scientific community is that scientists are deathly afraid of accepted theories being disproved. In fact, the very opposite is true. In academia, the way you get ahead is exactly by changing or significantly extending current theories. You get a Nobel Prize by showing that something long accepted is wrong. Every physicist out there would be delighted to be the one who showed that Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, was wrong. He'd be famous for centuries. The same holds true for evolution. No one has "faith" that evolution is true, and everyone would love to be the one to overturn it if it were false. However, the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. For example, it has been pointed out by biologists that we actually have more evidence for evolution just in genetic and chemical studies than we do that the Roman empire existed! And notice - this is not including the fossil record. Think about that. How do you know that the Roman Empire ever actually existed? It all comes down to evidence. Now, we have tons and tons of evidence that it did exist: we have many physical structures all over the western world, and we have lots and lots of written evidence from the time. But there is still some probability, some tiny, tiny probability, that it's all false - forged or misunderstood. Nothing has a probability of true zero. So maybe there's a 1 in a trillion trillion trillion chance that the Roman Empire didn't exist. Well, the chance the evolution isn't true, [I]based only on genetic and other biological evidence[/I], is less than that number. Throw in the fossil record, and the number drops way, way lower. Another misunderstanding I see a lot is that evolution is now at the same state that it was in the 19th century when Darwin first proposed it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists, over decades and decades, have tried to disprove it (that's what scientists do, all the time: try to disprove things) and have failed. What has happened is just the opposite: evidence has done nothing but accumulate at an ever-increasing rate. Remember, we now no longer even need the fossil record to prove evolution - that's just how the theory got started, and the vast majority of critics, such as are shown in the video, seem to be stuck arguing the evidence that was presented in 1859. Not only is it not true that "no true facts have ever been found that support it", in fact, no true fact has ever been found that doesn't support it. [*] The Wall Street Journal article he quotes, from 2014, uses the long-disproven "fine-tuning" argument, which basically sees the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life as evidence of a supernatural intelligence. The article was not written by a scientist, but by a religious writer. Now, obviously, that's not a problem in itself. But it does frequently mean that the understanding of complex scientific ideas may not be completely accurate, and we do indeed see that here. For example, we really don't know all the factors that would be required for life to exist. Rather, we have some idea of the factors that would allow life as we know it here on Earth to exist. And even that understanding is limited because the process is so complex. It has been pointed out that this really is an example of life being fine-tuned for the environment in which it evolved, rather than the other way around. Another claim the article makes is that since we haven't discovered any life anywhere else, the theory of evolution is shot. One problem here is that although we haven't found life yet, we continue to find planets around other stars that seem like they'd be capable of supporting life of some kind, and we're finding them at an increasing rate. The search continues, but even if no life is found, it is not a disproof of evolution, but rather a statement of something we already know - that the process itself is complex and takes a long time - maybe complex and slow enough that it just hasn't happened anywhere else in [I]our[/I] part of [I]our own[/I] galaxy (remember, there are over a hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars). And quoting Fred Hoyle, a physicist, not a biologist, on evolution is a weak version of the argument from authority, in which an expert is found and cherry-picked, rather than looking at the overwhelming number of actual biologists on the other side. Being an outsider is fine, and the arguments are interesting and valid to have, but you can't use the one person you can find who agrees with you and plop him down on the table as if it vastly bolsters your case. Because I'll find thousands of academics, every bit as qualified as Hoyle (much more qualified, actually, since they are experts in the biology itself) to say the opposite. [*]Farther in, the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics are brought up in a way that has long been shown to be based on a faulty understanding of those laws. One argument he makes is that the radioactive elements such as uranium must all have come into existence in the beginning, since they've been decaying ever since. However, this is false. The big-bang model states that originally, only energy came into existence (but even this is hard to understand, because a common version of the theory has time itself starting at the same event), and eventually you got only one type of atom: hydrogen. All the other atomic varieties come into existence through fusion taking place in the center of stars, and the heavier elements like uranium are created when a star explodes in a supernova, and the vast forces involved end up making the heavy elements by fusing together lighter ones. This happens continually. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss have talked a lot about the "nothing from nothing" idea that is so counter-intuitive to humans. His book A Universe From Nothing is a very good popular-level discussion of the issue. A subtle and oft missed point, I think, is that the word "theory" in science and math doesn't mean the same thing that it does in everyday English. When we use the word in our daily life, we mean something more like a hunch or an idea. Scientifically, the word refers to a solid body of work that has a consistent model and has been vetted by different experts for a very long time. The "theory of evolution" isn't just some armchair-based speculation that happened over a beer by a couple of dudes having a good time. Rather, it is a consistent model of an enormous body of data that has been examined from every possible direction and tested over and over again in every possible way for over a century by hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Another point is that it is tempting but disastrous to use your everyday visualizations when trying to understand physics that is outside our everyday experience. Those visualizations are very useful for living on Earth as a biological being of our size. But they can lead you far astray if you rely on them when thinking about the huge scale, like cosmology, or the tiny scale, like quantum mechanics. In both of those areas, you have to cast aside your preconceived visualizations of how things work, and rely solely on the mathematics. This is because visualizing things like a 4-dimensional curved spacetime are impossible to directly do. But understanding them is not impossible if you use mathematics. You might not be able to "see" a curved spacetime, but you can work with it and apply it successfully by using the math, and that leads to a certain kind of understanding. This is all the more true when trying to talk about the origin of the universe, where time itself becomes highly nonlinear - something that is utterly foreign to us. [/LIST] Haha, well, this post got a bit longer than I thought it would. So I'll shut up now. :wink: [/QUOTE]
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