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Will Once - somewhere and back again
My car has abs...
I know right - what a catch!
Almost crawled into my iPad screen just then.
Great movie clichés of our time - the hollowed-out volcano. The bad guy who wants you to catch him.Willing suspension of disbelief or hoary old clichés?
http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/09...
Interesting question Will.I suspect that within a culture we have stories, tropes that we all share.
Telling these stories might boost our sense of belonging
Jim - that's very true. We have common themes like "good guys battle baddies" and "people helping each other".I think we also have a number of tropes that exist to help move a story on, but which don't have such a strong root in a common sense of belonging.
PattiJust for you, does God exist?
By way of George Clooney.
Feel free to replace George with Brad and season to taste.
http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/09...
Interested to see how this progresses.
Glad you're enjoying it. Here's part two - does evolution stick the knife into religion?http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/09...
Off to bed now.Will save it til the weekend. Gimme a few more, k?
The old eyeball argument is a lot of fun, or at least it used to be. I've seen it argued both ways - either as proof that God exists or that he doesn't.The argument used to run that an eyeball is such a complex and complete mechanism that it is hard to imagine half an eyeball. You can't evolve your way to an eyeball. It has to be designed.
This argument falls over when you point out the vast number of animals which do have primitive eyes...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye#Pit_...
Of course, we humans tend to overlook this. We focus mostly on mammals which do have the more complex kind of eye. We don't have so much experience of the simpler eyes used by insects and fish.
The main problem with evolution is that it can seem counterintuitive. We look at the end product - an eyeball - and can't imagine how evolution ended up there. What we find hard to grasp is the 3.5 billion years of development that led us to that point.
It's a bit like technology. If we showed an I-phone to someone from say 200 years ago they would think it was witchcraft. They would find it difficult to comprehend the millions if not billions of man hours which went into creating it.
Anything developed over a long period of time looks like witchcraft - or divine creation.
The argument from perfect design is another one that I've seen used on both sides. If God designed our eyes, why didn't he make them better? How come some people are short-sighted or I need to wear glasses? Wouldn't a benevolent God give us all 20-20 vision?
Similarly, I've seen it argued that eyes could not have evolved because they should be better.
Neither argument really works. We don't know if God gave us imperfect eyes for a reason. Don't they say that he moves in mysterious ways?
And as evolution is a process of constant improvement, we have no reason to expect that we are the finished article. Our eyes are better than they were, but not as good as they will be. That's how evolution works. It evolves.
I feel a little sorry for the eyeball argument. It used to be such fun, but these days it's mostly played out.
Eyeballs evolved.
Of course, that doesn't prove that God does or does not exist. He just didn't sit down at his drawing board and design the eyeball, just as he didn't design the redundant parts of the human body such as the coccyx.
I don't see these as problems at all.First, we need to dispose of the concept of "intentional". There is no intention behind evolution. The better equipped creatures get more sex and their kids live longer to have more sex in their turn. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. Successful genes are passed down from generation to generation.
The giraffe didn't set out to have a long neck. It's just that early versions of the giraffe got more food if they could reach the highest parts of the tree. And the ones that got more food were healthier and so got more sex. Necks got longer over time.
Species don't turn into each other? There is a mountain of evidence to show that they do. Take every human or hominid skeleton that has ever been unearthed and lay them next to each other, from oldest to newest.
And what you will see is a clear progression from one species to another. Over time we have been getting taller, our brains have been getting larger, we have been walking straighter.
Of course, if you take a skeleton from either end of the line you would say they were from different species. You couldn't possibly get from this short, hairy knuckle-dragger to us.
Except we did. The evidence is indisputable.
Reach round to the base of your spine. That lump of bone is your coccyx - the vestigial remnants of a tail. How do we know it is that? By comparing it to other animals who have similar things. And when you do that you can clearly see a progression from one species to another.
You are living breathing proof of one species turning into another.
When evolution was first proposed, one of the biggest arguments against it was the so-called "missing link" argument. If we are descended from apes then where is the skeleton of the half-human, half ape that shows this progression in progress?
There were a number of problems with this argument. First we didn't evolve from apes - it was a common ancestor. And second we have now found the "missing links" - the fossil records clearly showing us changing from one species into another.
As a result, the "no missing link" argument has largely been consigned to history. It simply does not fit the evidence.
I don't get upset when people question evolution. We should question everything that we are told. But I have yet to see a single problem with the theory of evolution or anyone coming up with anything remotely more credible.
The whole evolution thing is interesting and I've watched it in actionWe had a situation forty years ago where an antibiotic no longer worked on our farm. The bacteria had resistance to it. We stopped using it and our vet swapped over to something equally elderly and obsolete.
But about fifteen years ago I had a sick calf late one Sunday night. Nothing about, but then I found a pack of the previous antibiotic that was left over from 25 years previously. On the grounds it wasn't going to hurt and might help I gave the calf the required dose and hoped it would keep it going until the vet could come next morning.
Next morning the calf is fine, 100% recovered.
This is where evolution kicks in. Having a gene that is resistant to that antibiotic is great, but only if the antibiotic is out there. If the bacteria or its descendants never meet the antibiotic then the gene is a logistic nightmare. It's like us all lugging around a lance and full armour wherever we know in case we have to fight a dragon. It costs us a fortune at airports, the rail company demand we pay for an extra ticket for the suit of armour, and taxi drivers don't want to know us.
So this gene which in 1970 was the greatest thing bacteria had, in 1995 is a ball and chain round their neck, bacteria with it are handicapped, they haven't got room for the new 'must have' gene and they fade away. So in 1995 the dragon actually stuck and everybody is left wondering where they left their armour and lance.
Where people go wrong is that they regard evolution as a big deal, it isn't,it's a mechanism. It's like erosion or continental drift. It's a side effect of what's in place.
Maybe your version of Google works differently to mine?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultr...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite...
That's just from the first page of the google search results for "speciation". There's lots lots more.
And plenty of documented examples of new speciation.
I've got an open mind. I'll take a look at Almost like a whale and report back.
How much more evidence do you need? The Wikipedia article gives dozens of examples. The footnotes take you to dozens more. Head along to any natural history museum and take a look at the dinosaur fossils.
Or think about this ... if we dig through the rock strata we find different species at different levels - ie different ages of the earth. And we find that wholly different kinds of critters lived at different times.
Now ask yourself - how did that happen if not for speciation? You are surely not going to say that each individual species died out and then God came along to create some wholly new species. And then that species died out and he created some more? And that he kept on doing this until he got to Adam and Eve?
Please tell me you aren't claiming that.
Inter-species evolution generally happens over a long time. That's why it's not so easy to document it. There was no-one around at the beginning of prehistory to take measurements.
So, yes, when we are looking for cast-iron examples we do need to look for things that have evolved sufficiently recently. This means that they can be documented to show noticeable changes over time. And yes that generally isn't interspecies evolution, because that takes a long time.
So, yes, the easily quantified examples are not about speciation. AIDS. The different variations in the Galapagos Islands. Darwin's Finches.
But here's the funny thing. If we look at the fossil record we can see inter-species evolution happening. If we look at more recent quantifiable changes in animals we see evolution within a species. And anyway the term "species" is only a convenient definition for classification purposes.
The one constant is evolution. We can see it happening over long periods and we can see it happening over short periods.
Now think about the evolution that we can see happening on a small scale. Darwin's Finches, say, or the Galapagos Island turtles. If we can see them changing a little bit over a small period of time, extrapolate forwards into time. What would these continual small changes add up to over a period of billions of years?
Yup - speciation. It can't do anything else.
You asked for one or two examples. I'll give you millions. Just about every creature on this planet is continually evolving. There are one or two, like sharks and bacteria, that haven't changed much since prehistoric times. But just about everything else is evolving.
Let's start with homo sapiens. How does the bible explain the fossil remains of the pre-human hominids?
That's a race of nearly humans who existed before Adam and Eve.
I'm not a great fan of the term "speciation". As far as I can see animals evolve little by little as genetic traits are passed on from one generation to the next. At some point, we declare that one animal is sufficiently different from another to be called a different species. But this seems entirely arbitrary. It seems to be something for man's convenience as part of taxonomy and doesn't have any basis in reality.
Man domesticated the wolf and from that we get modern day dogs. But is a dog a different species to a wolf? And is a poodle the same species as a Rottweiler? I'm not sure that I really care much either way.
For me the universe is a messy and organic place. I don't think that neat divisions like species exist - other than in a broad definition of what an animal will be able to breed with.
I haven't read Evolution from Space, although I know about the theory. Maybe I ought to put it on my TBR list too.
Will wrote: "Part three is up - the elephant of faith:http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/09..."
I'm annoyed. Have opened the page a half dozen times and only half will load.
Could you please paste the text in here, Will?
I thought the definition of species is those creatures that can interbreed?Therefore dogs and wolves are of the same species?
I'm woefully uninformed on the subject but more than willing to learn.
Oh, and have you read Galápagos?
Read it years ago and found it fascinating on many levels.
Sorry about that, Patti. The post looks okay from my end. Here it is:God, Maybe – the difficult third album
How did we ever manage before some bright spark invented the phrase “there is an elephant in the room”?
It says it so neatly. There is a big thing here that we are not talking about.
When it comes to the God question, there is a mahassive elephant in the room. And that elephant is called faith.
The funny thing is that faith causes problems for both sides of the argument. That might be why it has become an elephant.
But first, let’s have a bible story. Moses climbs Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments. He is gone for forty days and forty nights. That seems to be the usual length of time for most things to happen in the Bible.
And while he is gone, his followers get a bit restless. They presumably don’t know that he will come back on the morning of the forty first day. They always do.
So the people ask Moses’ brother Aaron to make them some gods. As you do.
And in a plot twist worthy of Hollywood, Aaron gathers up all their gold jewellery and makes them a golden calf to worship.
God and Moses, perhaps understandably, are a bit miffed by this. So much so that the very first commandment is “Thou shalt have no other gods”.
And that’s the problem. Christianity does need a commandment telling people not to have other gods, because history is chock full of other gods.
Just about every civilization that has ever existed on this Earth has had a religion of some sort. Sometimes several religions.
You name it, and we have probably worshipped it at some point in our history. Cats and dogs, cows – heck even elephants. We have worshipped father figures, mother figures, whole families. We’ve imagined our gods walking amongst us, living in the stars, under the earth and on top of mountains.
Sometimes we even imagine that the randier of our gods turn themselves into bulls so that they can come to Earth and impregnate virgins. I have never quite understood how that one works and I am too afraid to Google it.
We have dreamt up many versions of the afterlife and different ways of getting there – cremated, buried, mummified. In coffins, pyramids, burial mounds, scattered over the hallowed turf of Wembley or in a pretty little china urn on the mantelpiece.
I have a particular fondness for the Romans. They simply took the Greek gods and gave them new names. I suppose it is the ultimate form of recycling.
The Vikings imagined that heaven was one massive party in Valhalla where they would be permanently drunk. That’s probably where Star Trek got the idea for the Klingons.
Right now there are an estimated 4,200 active religions in the world.
The challenge for atheism is quite simple. If there is no God, how can we explain our need to believe in gods? If there is nothing there, how come just about every civilization has believed in gods? That’s an awful lot of believing to dismiss as a delusion.
The challenge for religion is also simple. How come all these gods are so different from each other? If just one of them is right and all the others wrong, why hasn’t that religion risen to the top by now?
This is the £64,000 question. Any credible theory for the existence or non-existence of God has to explain the faith elephant.
After all, it is one of the few things that we know for certain. We know that different cultures worshipped a wide variety of gods because they have helpfully told us so. They have put up statues, painted pictures, written stories, built pyramids.
There is no getting away from this one. Humans have lots of gods. We always have and probably always will.
The next interesting question is why. I can see three possible explanations:
1. They are all wrong. There is no god. Fools!
2. My religion is the only correct one. All the others are wrong.
3. They are all sort of right. Ish. Approximately. More or less.
Option 2 is particularly intriguing. My religion is right and all the others are wrong. The problem with this argument is … how can you know that?
In large part, your religion is determined by a postcode lottery. Most people assume the religion of their parents and their home country. It’s what you know. What you are taught. It feels right, in the same way that your mother tongue and local customs feel right.
But how can that make it any more right than the faith of another country? You would have a very different faith if you were born in in India, or China, or an Amish community, or Israel, or Syria, or …
You get the idea.
Ah, but then you will argue that you know that God exists because you can feel him. You have faith. He speaks to you. You don’t have to explain it or justify it. Your faith comes from within you.
Unfortunately, the believers in all the other world religions can say exactly the same thing. And all the followers of the religions which have died out. They also have (or had) exactly the same feelings of deep faith. They also believed in miracles. Their gods spoke to them too.
There is another implication of the “my faith is right, yours is wrong” argument. If that is true, then all other faiths apart from yours must be false. Few religions believe in competing gods. It’s an all or nothing deal. My God exists – yours does not.
That line of argument can mean only one thing - that mankind invents gods. More than that, it means that the vast majority of gods must have been invented. After all, Moses and God complained about the worship of false gods – gods that did not exist.
And, if that is true, how can so many people believe so fervently in something that evidently does not exist?
And that is a question which ought to trouble both atheism and religion.
Now that’s what I call an elephant.
Patti - You are quite right. One commonly used definition of a species is indeed that the animals in it can interbreed. The problem is that it doesn't always work. Some of our randier critters will shag anything. Some dogs evidently think that they are in the same species as a human's trouser leg.
And then there are the precious little ice maidens, like giant pandas and my ex-wife who have to be in exactly the right mood.
More about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_...
It seems that nature doesn't like to follow rules.
I wasn't specific enough I guess.I should have said 'produce progeny'.
Dammit. That one is only half loading as well.Ipad has been fucked since the latest update.
Paste here, please?
Anything for you.God, Maybe – 4
What does a god do, exactly?
If we were to put an advert in the local paper, what skills and experience would we ask for?
Wanted: experienced deity. Must be omnipotent, omniscient and have a clean cosmos driving licence. Previous experience not required (or possible).
Most deities do three things – they create the world, they answer prayers and they provide an afterlife for those of us who haven’t been naughty.
We’ve already talked about creation. I have no desire to have a personal experience of the afterlife (or lack thereof). So let’s talk about the one in the middle.
Let’s talk about prayer.
This is the deal. We want something out of life – maybe to recover from an illness, to win the lottery, to get a good job, world peace, that sort of thing.
So we send a mental email to whichever god we believe in. Dear god, could you please …
And just to make sure that he hears us, we close our eyes and put our hands together. Maybe that’s how you send an interstellar email? Or we go to a tall building and we get someone to play an organ, ring church bells and we all say our prayers in unison. Maybe if we all say it at the same time we’ve got a better chance of him listening?
Some religions even insist on saying their prayers in Latin. He likes Latin.
But does prayer actually work?
The problem is that it’s very hard to tell at an individual level. If you pray for something and that thing happens, you have no way of knowing if your prayer caused the thing to happen. Or if it would have happened anyway.
Around 80% of medical illnesses clear themselves up naturally without the need for any intervention from medicine or the almighty. That’s how quack medicines work. You only think that your illness was cured by Cher’s bottle of Doctor Good.
So let’s try an experiment. Let’s see if we can use prayer to influence this week’s lottery results. I would like everyone to pray for a certain set of numbers. And not just prayer. Let’s throw luck in too. I’d like you all to cross your fingers, stroke your magic rabbit’s foot, touch wood. Whatever you do to bring yourself good fortune.
Heck, I’ll even let you choose your lucky numbers. Numbers that mean something to you.
Everyone ready for the big experiment?
What’s that? Don’t tell me you have doubts? You don’t think that we can get enough people working together to affect the result?
That’s a fair point.
You don’t think that God will play ball if he knows it’s an experiment? Yup, that’s a good point too.
And we can’t let people choose their own lucky numbers. Because if everyone did that we wouldn’t be able to see the result.
All, good and valid points. So let’s change the experiment. Let’s run it retrospectively on every lottery that has ever been run, every roulette wheel that has ever spun a ball, every game of chance, in the history of mankind. Ever.
You see, we humans are a predictable lot. When we are asked to think up a lucky number, we nearly always plump for small numbers.
Our own and our family’s birthdays? Apart from the year, that will be one number less than or equal to 31 and one number less than or equal to 12. House numbers? Statistically there are more lower numbers than high ones. Most streets have a number 1, but only the longer streets have a 51.
Researchers at Southampton University found that 7 was by far the most popular lucky number, being chosen 25% more often than 46 (the least popular).
So when we spin a roulette wheel or watch the lottery balls come tumbling down, there is an immense amount of prayer and luck being directed at the smaller numbers.
Admittedly, you praying for 7 is going to counteract everyone praying for 6. But that doesn’t matter. We are looking for any low number.
Here’s the experiment – if prayer can affect our chances of winning the lottery, we ought to see more low numbers coming up than high ones. And 7 ought to be the most successful of all.
And what do we find?
Nothing at all.
Over countless lotteries, spins of roulette wheels and games of chance there is absolutely no discernible bias towards lower numbers. Or the number 7. The number 13 isn’t unlucky. It’s just another number.
Some people will say that is a trivial example. God isn’t going to get involved in something as mercenary as a lottery win. So let’s look at a more serious issue. Praying for someone who is sick.
This is less clear cut. If you are interested, you can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_...
What seems to be happening is that people do get better if they know that someone is praying for them.
But if they don’t know that, then prayer seems to have somewhere between very little effect and no effect. And it does seem that the more rigorous the test, the more likely it is that there will be no discernible impact on the person’s health.
How do we interpret all of this?
That may depend on your point of view. If you are a disciple of Dawkins you may alight on the studies that showed that there was no effect.
If you incline more towards belief, your eye will fall on those studies that did spot an effect, no matter how small or how faint. After all, you only need one tiny scrap of proof that God exists.
If you are somewhere in the middle and open minded, there are some intriguing conclusions to be drawn.
First, prayer seems to have no effect on inanimate objects or events such as the lottery. An atheist is as likely to win the jackpot as a nun. And, I expect, would be far more imaginative in how he or she would spend the money.
Secondly, there does seem to be something happening when people pray or know that they are in someone else’s prayers. There may be no physical healing going on, but prayer does seem to have the power to make people happier.
People who pray say that it is a comfort for them in difficult times. It may not be doing anything, but it feels good.
A scientist would call that the placebo effect. A pill or a treatment with no medical value can help you get better becomes it makes you think that you will get better.
But here’s the rub. A placebo only works if you believe that it will work. As soon as you know it’s a placebo, the benefit disappears.
To paraphrase Henry Ford, whether you believe prayer does any good, or you don’t, you are probably right.
Producing progeny is also a bit problematical. Not to mention alliterative.
In some cases, separate species can interbreed and produce offspring. In other cases, animals within the same species can't.
If we take a pure Darwinian view, then the concept of species doesn't really exist. All creatures evolve by making tiny changes from one generation to the next. Two tall parents make taller children, and so on.
Over an immense amount of time, creatures that used to be similar become more and more different. Eventually they become so different that they can't interbreed. And we would call that a different species.
But there is no neat dividing line - one day you are species X and the next you are species Y.
But apparently you can still cross a poodle with a rottwieler. The resulting dog is known as either a rottle or rotti-poo. And no I'm not making that up!
http://www.dogbreedplus.com/dog_breed...
I'll have a fluffy rottie-poo, please.I've been teaching alliteration all week.
Cat
Cup
Cake
Can
Coma
Will wrote: "Producing progeny is also a bit problematical. Not to mention alliterative.
In some cases, separate species can interbreed and produce offspring..."
Indeed, Will, here is no one satisfactory definition of a species, especially once you get away from higher animals. You could argue that retroviruses interbreed with us, as they insert their genes into our DNA for the purpose of making progeny (and some of these genes have persisted in the human genome). Darwin may have worried about the "problem" of species; modern evolutionary biologists are rather more laid back about it.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "I'll have a fluffy rottie-poo, please.I've been teaching alliteration all week.
Cat
Cup
Cake
Can
Coma"
Patti, I once wrote a flash story of 100 single word sentences, all beginning with the letter 'C'!
Marc! I want to see it!In fact, I want one for every letter of the alphabet, please.
No swears though, please.
Oh and I read that as a fish story.Carp.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "Marc! I want to see it!In fact, I want one for every letter of the alphabet, please.
No swears though, please."
this is the "c" story
http://sulcicollective.blogspot.co.uk...
You put it on here, didn't you, Marc? I remember it - and I'm older than Patti!
Kath wrote: "You put it on here, didn't you, Marc? I remember it - and I'm older than Patti!"can't recall to be honest Kath. It was in my first collection from 2010 and my brain doesn't go back that far
Patti (baconater) wrote: "Completely."chortle
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Sadly lacking in abs, though."
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