99.9% Of a People Who Believe In Evolution Don't Understand It.

by Space Madness 89 Replies latest jw friends

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  snare&racket

  I understand the issue, but the text is 100% correct. There is NO RESPONSE to the antibiotics, response implies intelligence or intent.

  the irony is SM started by saying he didn't accept evolution because 'bacteria can't think' . He then uses as evidence a quote that says it is a misconception to believe bacteria RESPOND or find a resistance due to a NEED to find one.

  It is 100% random, that is all the quote is saying.

  But a basic science 101 explianation of evolution would have made this clear to someone interested in evolution. To assume it is a legitimate mistake is to assume it is ok to go from no knowlege of evolution and then to read that paragraph on the mechanism of evolution.

  SM needs to start with the basics, so as to not trip themselves up like this. It is not a slam down or intentionally offensive statement to say 'go get some books'... it is a sincere answer to thr problem, the ONLY answer. My bedside is piled high with books.

  There is no shortcut.

  I must admit and I know I should not assume, but it appears to me SM is seeking to undermine not understand. As I said, if they really wanted to know they would read evolution 101 and had they done, the paragraph they quoted WOULD HAVE made sense to them.
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  snare&racket

  and this on a thread claiming 99.9% of evolutionary believers don't understand it....

  Come on Apog, we have chatted enough, you are not dumb. This is an embarrassingly iironic, ignorant thread.

  The solution isn't excusing the ignorance and ignoring the very untruthful thread title, it is education.
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  GrreatTeacher

  There appears to be a reading comprehension problem with the quote. Let's read it again.

  "Many people mistakenly believe that antibiotics create resistance; that is, that resistance arises in bacteria in response to exposure to drugs."

  The structure of the sentence is that the first statement is then clarified by the semicolon and the words "that is."

  The second statement says that "resistance arises in bacteria IN RESPONSE to exposure to drugs." This is the fallacy: that the bacteria are RESPONDING TO the environment and CREATING resistance, as the first part of the sentence states. It is NOT stating that there is no such thing as bacterial resistance.

  With a basic understanding of the subject, you can easily understand which words are being stressed in that sentence.
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  Apognophos

  There is NO RESPONSE to the antibiotics, response implies intelligence or intent.

  Mm, if you define it that way, then sure, there's no response. But a response can be a mechanical one as well, like a rock "responding" to being thrown or a plant responding to the direction of sunlight. In this case the response is in the form of an adapting population over time. I don't see where the text actually rebuts the mistaken notion than an organism is knowingly evolving. It just says there is 'no response'. You are assigning an intent to that statement that is not given in the quotation.

  and this on a thread claiming 99.9% of evolutionary believers don't understand it...

  Perhaps you don't agree with that statement, but I agreed with it above. Who is an "evolutionary believer"? Didn't we all sit through biology classes in school where our bored classmates just accepted whatever they needed to in order to pass the tests? Because I've got news for you, those are evolutionary believers, and they are not informed about how evolution works. Unless you think that the same general public who aren't entirely sure that the Earth revolves around the Sun somehow have a good working knowledge of evolutionary mechanics.
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  GrreatTeacher

  I beg to differ that I am assigning an intent not given in the quotation.

  A thorough reading of the rest of the textbook would make the meaning very apparent, as long as Space is truly quoting from a university level college textbook of biology. Understanding the entire subject (as I and other members of the board do) makes it quite apparent what the meaning of that sentence is.
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  breakfast of champions

  99.9% of people who "believe in" gravity don't understand it either.
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  GrreatTeacher

  Well, actually, it's not that things are really falling...
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  snare&racket

  But apog, if you understood evolution you would know that response, be it mechanical or via thought is not how evolution works.

  I said 'intent' because that was the context of SM argument. But if we change it to mechanical, it is still wrong if you have a basic understanding of evolution. The antibiotics do NOTHING to contribute to the formation of the RANDOM mutation.

  The antibiotics are relevant to the natural selection of that mutation, because the antibiotic use is now a factor in the enviroment. To explain, Natural selection is a term that came from Darwin seeing human selective breeding on farms, mate two fat pigs and you get very fat piglets. Natural selection just means the enviroment, nature itself, does the selecting, instead of the farmer. So the antibiotic use is an alteration in the enviroment that makes the randomly mutated genes a useful thing, or a useless thing.

  The important point the 'textbook' is making is that..... in no way is the DNA responding to the enviroment i.e. antibiotic use.

  Imagine if I made a computer program to randomly type out letters continuously on a screen. Now, unbeknown to the computer program, everytime it randomly forms a word whilst randomly outputting letters, I will note down the word formed and keep a list of all the words made.Any words formed by the computer are formed at random still, they are in no way responding to me looking for them to exist.

  Do you see the analogy?
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  Apognophos

  A thorough reading of the rest of the textbook would make the meaning very apparent, as long as Space is truly quoting from a university level college textbook of biology. Understanding the entire subject (as I and other members of the board do) makes it quite apparent what the meaning of that sentence is.

  A well-written textbook should have been clear from the beginning. Evolution isn't that hard to explain. I will defend evolution against naysayers but I will not defend poorly-written text.

  The antibiotics do NOTHING to contribute to the formation of the RANDOM mutation. The antibiotics are relevant to the natural selection of that mutation

  I totally agree; I never said that the antibiotics cause the mutation, and implied the opposite in a previous post. The antibiotics are still causing a response in the bacteria, however. The response is in the form of the natural selection (the culling of non-resistant bacteria) which comes from the antibiotics.

  Your analogy does not relate to evolution because there is no feedback on the random words. In evolution, the undesirable words would occur less often due to natural selective pressures, and over time the words would drift in a more desirable direction, albeit with a certain amount of meandering due to random mutations.
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  GrreatTeacher

  The irony is that the textbook was attempting to clear up a supposedly common misconception and succeeded in creating even more misconceptions.